


When the Center Comes

by Mertiya



Series: Center-verse [2]
Category: Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion... - Sandia Labs, The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Artificial Intelligence, Awkward Flirting, Body Horror, Center-verse, Dreams and Nightmares, Elias tries to help John flirt with Martin because of course he does, F/M, Futuristic Judaism, Jewish Elias, Judaism, Languages and Linguistics, M/M, Multi, Myths and legends about the Manhattan project, Origin Myths, Post-Apocalypse, The Corruption, The Hunt, The Spiral, The Stranger - Freeform, The Web - Freeform, The far future looking back on the approximately present in new and interesting ways
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2019-11-28 15:20:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 38,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18210059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: Jonathan Sims, a scholar of the Banded Eye, is searching for the Center, a semi-mythical repository of ancient knowledge, with the help of a ghostly voice in his ear. He soon meets and joins a new group of scholars who agree to help him in his search.  But as Jon grows closer to them, he begins to realize that there are darker secrets than he expected bound up in his quest.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Umbel for beta-ing, to Kyros and lontradiction and Teakwood and Zomb for general encouragement, to Rastaban for helping me work out plot kinks.

            Gertrude shivered and sneaked closer to the fire. She wasn’t supposed to be this close, but it was freezing outside and still a little chilly inside. Papa kept going in and out, opening and closing the door, and letting in uncomfortable blasts of snow-laden wind. Ugh.

            It wasn’t that Gertrude didn’t like the weekly ritual; it was just that when it was freezing and snowing outside, she didn’t want to _be_ outside. She didn’t see why they needed to be, anyway. You couldn’t see the sky if it was snowing, anyway, and they all knew where Kimah was, but when she complained, Papa fixed her with his best black-eyed stare and told her it was important.

            Rubbing her hands together at the fire, she scowled. She liked snow, but winter in the mesas was cold and unpleasant, and she hated how frozen her toes got. “Gertrude, not so close to the fire.” Gertrude sighed and rolled her eyes as Da put a hand on her shoulder, but grudgingly scooted back.

            “I’m cold,” she grumbled, rubbing her hands together. “I don’t see why we have to do this, especially outside.”

            “Papa isn’t strict about most rituals, but this one means a lot to him,” Da said quietly.

            “Well, he ought to tell me why then.” Gertrude crossed her arms. “The Eye says you should always explain your actions.”

            “Technically, the Eye says you should question everything, it doesn’t say anything about explanations.” Dad, smirking at her; Da snorted gently at the question. Gertrude rolled her eyes. “An explanation would help, then?” His voice gentled a little.

            “Yes!” Gertrude exclaimed. She’d been trying to get the story of Kimah for years now, but one of her parents—she wasn’t sure which, it might be Da or it might be Ma—kept thinking she was too young for it and telling the others not to tell the story.

            “All right,” Da sighed. “I’ll tell you the story while Papa sets up for the ritual. Why don’t you get Fay as well? She’ll probably like being near the fire. And she sort of features in the story anyway.”

            “Okay!” Gertrude said eagerly. She got up and headed for the terrarium at the other side of the room. “C’mon, Fay, are you okay with being out now?” She put her hand down into the terrarium carefully and waited. After a minute, Fay ventured out from under a leaf, waving her pedipalps and front legs, paused, and then scuttled onto Gertrude’s hand. Gertrude lifted her, flat-handed, and carefully made her way back to the fire, murmuring soothing noises. Fay waved her front legs some more as if in answer.

            Gertrude sat down in front of the fire and crossed her legs, holding Fay carefully. After a moment, Da and Ma joined her. “Do you want to tell the story?” Ma asked.

            “I mean, I think we might all have to. I think Jon saw more of it than anyone else, really.”

            “I’ll start then.” Dad reached up to his ear and pulled off the little grey triangle with its row of blinking lights that housed Papa, passing him over to Ma. “Can you do the ritual setup?”

            She smiled at him, tucking Papa under her own ear. “All right.”

            “Gertrude,” Dad said, seating himself next to Da and her. “You know this is a true story, and it’s not a nice one, in a number of places. Are you still certain you want to hear it?”

            “Yes, please.” Gertrude nodded eagerly. “Stories don’t have to be nice if they’re true.”

            Dad chuckled, and Da reached out to ruffle her hair. “You take after your Papa, all right,” Dad said, with a strange little half-sigh. “Not that I’ve got much of a leg to stand on. All right, then. This is the story of four scholars and their sacred place.”


	2. Chapter One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Journeying towards the Center with a ghostly companion, Jon meets a group of scholars of the Banded Eye.

            The horse’s hooves kicked up clouds of dust that coated Jon’s throat in a fine layer of choking grit. Coughing dislodged it for a few minutes, but, as that tended to send it into his lungs, he eventually gave up and just tried to hang on. The ride from Santio would have been hard even for an experienced rider, and he was hardly that. As his horse galloped past the worn stone triangle that marked the Trine, he sighed with relief. It had been years since he had last visited, but he still remembered the feeling gnawing at his stomach at the sight of the worn, incomprehensible letters formed on the side of the marker. It was stronger this time, that old, desperate hunger that had nothing to do with sustenance.

            With a groan, he reined in the horse, slowing on the approach to the cluster of low, tan tents beyond the Trine marker. From the nearest, the Banded Eye glared balefully back at him, daubed on the side in its typical yellow-and-black. “Gods, I hope this isn’t another dead end,” Jon said with a long sigh, as the horse slowed to a stop.

            The familiar prickle on the back of his neck told him that Elias had awoken. “Still don’t trust me?” Elias’s thin, grey voice murmured in Jon’s ear.

            “I’m just afraid of following another windmill story,” sighed Jon. Tiredly, he slipped over the side of the horse, barely landing on his feet.

            “Ahoy rider!” a voice called, and Jon stumbled against the horse and looked around.

            “Scholar, I think,” Elias told him. “Out of shape, possibly asthmatic, unlikely to be a threat to you.”

            “Not everything requires a threat assessment, Elias,” Jon muttered snappishly, even though he was grateful for the support.

            “Feel free to ignore me,” Elias suggested brightly, and Jon huffed in frustration and turned his attention to the person who had hailed him. The man was slightly taller than Jon and dressed in a light cotton tunic with the Banded Eye embroidered on the front and belted around with a black cord. He had a leather-bound book tucked beneath one arm.

            “This place is a message?” Jon said through dry lips, trying to keep himself from coughing, and the man’s eyes lit up.

            “It’s part of the message system!” he replied, and Jon drooped with relief.

            “I wouldn’t drop your guard, if I were you,” Elias said in his ear, but he could hear the faint note of derision that meant Elias was just—being Elias, rather than actually identifying a particular reason for caution.

            “I’m Jonathan Sims,” Jon said, raising a hand to his forehead in the traditional two-fingered greeting.

            “Martin Blackwood.” Martin copied him with the other hand. “Any other scholars are welcome here. There’s—not many of us left. It’s, um, not a very hospitable place out here.”

            “What are you still doing here then?” Jon asked, but he let Martin lead him over to a tent, the interior of which was glowing with bright yellow light.

            “Oh,” said Martin. “Um. I’m waiting for someone?” Even Jon could tell the smile he gave was forced, and he didn’t push the question. Instead, he ducked into the tent after Martin.

            Two other people were seated in the warmth of the interior, and they both looked up as Martin and Jon entered. “I found another scholar!” Martin said brightly. “He just rode in from the north!”

            “From Santio, actually,” Jon said awkwardly, pushing back the hood of his thin riding cloak. “I’m glad I made it in before full dark, or I think I would have missed this place entirely. I was expecting a town.”

            “The town’s moved on,” said the curly-haired man sitting at the desk. “We should, too.”

            The woman beside him put a hand on his arm. “Tim,” she said reprovingly. Then she looked up and gave Jon a bright smile. “We’ve been having a little trouble,” she said. “I’m Sasha, by the way. Hi!” Tim snorted and rolled his eyes.

            “What’s brought you all the way from Santio?” Martin asked. “Oh, and, um, do you need something to eat?”

            “Gods, yes,” Jon said, looking around for somewhere to sit. Sasha waved him towards a pile of rough cushions in the corner, and he collapsed on them with a grateful sigh. “I don’t think I’ve eaten since this morning. As for what I’m doing here, I think I’ve found a map to the Center.”

            Not quite true, he supposed, but close enough to it, and even if they were scholars, even if they were bound to the Eye, Elias had specifically requested he not speak about him, and by now Jon trusted him to have some kind of reasoning behind caution, even among scholars. There was a long pause, and the three people in the tent exchanged looks.

            Then Martin said in a voice that sounded an odd combination of strained and awed, “That’s—that’s amazing.”

            “I was hoping I would be able to find more scholars to help me,” Jon explained, another half-truth. “I don’t particularly want to take on a journey of more than two weeks into the desert without help.”

            The other man—Tim—laughed. “You want us to come _with_ you? You’ve just ridden into our camp with no warning, and you expect—”

            “He’s found the Center,” Martin interrupted, and there was a sudden sharp gleam in his eyes. “We’re going.”

            “He _thinks_ he has,” Tim said hotly. “A windmill chase always sounds so tempting if you have a stake in the proceedings.”

            “Tim,” Martin said. Tim breathed out angrily, then shrugged.

            “Fine,” he said. “Fine. But if I die, I want you to know that I will come back as a ghost and haunt you.”

            “You won’t die,” Martin said with a peculiar intensity. “Jonathan, let’s get you some food.”

            “Call me Jon,” Jon mumbled, sinking back into his pillow nest.

            “Always so susceptible to creature comforts, aren’t you,” Elias mocked him.

            “Shut up,” Jon murmured quietly. “You _really_ can’t talk.”           

            He dozed on the cushions as the three other scholars moved about, talking quietly amongst themselves. Tim went out to see to Jon’s horse. Someone—Martin, Jon thought—pressed a bowl of warm, thick soup into his hands that tasted of corn and sharp pepper. It revived him a little, enough to finger nervously at the round-edged grey triangle fixed to his skull just below his ear. It looked enough like simple jewelry, he supposed, that the other scholars probably wouldn’t question it.

            Jon had been searching for the Center for years now, ever since he had first heard a traveling scholar marked by the Banded Eye reciting one of the early poems. Jon wasn’t quite sure which one it was now except that he could still remember the line, “Safety is the place/When the center comes.” He’d gone to bed that night murmuring it over and over again, and the next day he’d asked his grandmother about it, though she didn’t have much to tell him.

            “A fairy tale,” she said. “Like the fairy cats. That’s all.”

            As he grew older, of course, Jon learned that it was somewhat more than that. The “Center” was a mythical location attested in many of the older oral histories, although none of the current written ones mentioned it with more than passing scorn. It was supposedly a repository of ancient knowledge, and it was frustratingly unclear as to whether there was truth to that or if it was simply an interpretation of one of the other fragmentary known verses about it, “This place is a message, it is part of the message system.”

            When Jon was sixteen, despite his grandmother’s objections, he was dedicated to the scholars of the Center, and he had the symbol of the Banded Eye tattooed on his back. He’d been all over the land, even to the far north beyond the boundaries of Nabiaha and to the Grifwigo itself. He’d choked on its smoke and stared up at the unending conflagration, the flames spouting up from within the earth itself, and wondered whether it could possibly be true that people lived _beyond_ that. He’d tried to find a way to pass, but he’d failed. Even if they did, how could the Center be there?

            What was it the Center _of_? Most scholars of the Banded Eye were of the opinion it was the center of the lost knowledge, but Jon wasn’t certain. There was so little information that sometimes he thought it might truly be a fairy tale, like his grandmother said. But whenever he got close to giving up in despair, he seemed to find something—another trickle of information, another fragment of a poem. It seemed years since he had left the huge city of Maysklaro where he had grown up, and maybe it had been. And then, of course, he’d found Elias.

            That had been quite by chance, a few months after the first time he’d left the Trine. The library at Pokswingay, a vast building of branching corridors and tunnels beneath the pink sand, had some exhibitions of ancient technology that could be viewed; even, with the correct permissions, handled. Jon did not have the correct permissions.

            What he did have was an idea that in some of that old, crumbling technology there might be a clue to the nature of the Center. He had toyed with the occasional artifact; he’d even once made an old whirligig function for a summer at his grandmother’s, stirring up the air and being fed insanely expensive power sources. He wanted to learn a better way to store energy; that was another driving impulse behind his single-minded goal to find the Center. Another fragment of a song. _The release of energy is a form of risk._ Of course it was a form of risk, Jon thought, but there were no rewards without risks.

            So he had snuck back into the library in the middle of the night, slipped past the guards like an invisible ghost, and made his way into the midst of the technology. Not much had come of it until he found the little grey triangle lying off to one side, marked as “energetic jewelry” with a neat placard showing the placement of it beneath the ear.

            There had been no real reason for him to do something so foolish, but he had _wondered_ immediately. Certainly jewelry was a plausible explanation for many accessory items, but at the same time it was so often just a scholarly expression of defeat. “It’s decorative, because we couldn’t figure out any other use for it.” Yielding to rash impulse, he’d tucked it just beneath his ear, and, after a moment, he’d heard Elias’s voice for the first time.

            Whatever the energetic entity was, his voice seemed human enough, and as soon as it was mentioned, he’d offered to guide Jon to the Center. Jon was still a little suspicious—how did Elias know where the Center was but not what lay hidden there? How could a voice so human-sounding emanate from a little grey triangle? What energy kept him alive?

            But Elias had done well by him, had led him to the location of a locker full of scholarly equipment and the deed of ownership to a sturdy horse. By now, though he had not given up on solving the mystery that was Elias, he was at least ready to call them—companions.

            Now—it was strange to be among other scholars like this. Martin’s black-haired head was bent over something that Sasha was writing, and they were talking amongst themselves as Jon ate quietly. Martin had the kind of fluffy hair Jon had always rather envied; it was very different from his own unflinchingly straight black hair that was in a perpetual state of needing to be cut and therefore was always kept out of his face in a tight braid.

            Jon’s spoon clinked on the bottom of the bowl. He hadn’t realized how much he had eaten, and his mouth was tingling pleasantly. Martin turned at the sound. “Finished?”

            “Yes. Thank you.”

            “So Sasha and I are thinking we could ride out tomorrow morning. Where does your map say the Center is?”

            Carefully setting his empty bowl to the side, Jon breathed out slowly, speaking only when he was certain Elias wasn’t about to place any restrictions on what he could tell them. “‘Map’ is a bit of a misnomer, I suppose. It’s directions that I found in an old scroll. Four or five hundred miles to the southeast of here. A journey of maybe three weeks.”

            “The middle of the Elsbad Desert?”

            Jon nodded. “I have more specific coordinates and some landmarks for when we get closer, of course. In my notebook.”

            Sasha and Martin looked at one another. “We should stop in Maysklaro,” Sasha said after a moment. “It’ll be on the way, and the Elsbad is crawling with Strangers. It won’t be safe for us to go without an escort.”

            “Which we are going to pay exactly how?” Martin pulled a face, but Sasha gave him a lopsided smile.

            “There’s the Huntresses. If I know those four, they’ll jump at the chance to go on an adventure. Well, except Daisy. She’ll just jump at the chance to kill some Strangers.”

            “You’re from Maysklaro?” Jon broke in, and Sasha gave him a brilliant smile.

            “We both are. I wasn’t born there. I spent five years in the Dedication of Uvera, learning the ways of her Huntresses, but I was, um—” she paused, “—called by the Eye.” Martin elbowed her. “Okay! And I met Tim,” she confessed. “It turns out I’m, um, not just for women.”

            “I can hardly blame you,” Jon said to his bowl, and Martin sniggered. “I mean, ehm, I’m not—” he hadn’t intended to discuss this, but he was sleepy and the words had welled out before he could stop them. “I’m not for women, either, and— _very_ rarely for men.”

            “Ever?” Elias’s sinuous whisper slid into his ear. “That’s data I did not have, Jon.”

            Ignoring him, Jon blinked up and tried to recover from the sudden confession. “At any rate, I grew up in Maysklaro, although I rarely had any interactions with the Huntresses.”

            “Oh, lovely!” Sasha exclaimed. “We can compare notes!”

            Before the conversation could continue any farther, the tent flap opened and Tim came back in. “Horse is taken care of,” he said shortly, then looked over at Sasha, who was giving him a frustrated sort of look, and sighed. “Sorry if I seem short,” he told Jon, without looking at him. “The last time someone told us he’d found the Center, it didn’t go all that well.”

            “It went fine,” Martin muttered, but he waved a hand as the others looked at him. “No, um, sorry, I get it. Jon, you look exhausted. Where should we have him sleep?”

            “You’re the one with an extra bedroll, aren’t you?” Tim asked. Something tense had grown up in the tent again, and Jon went quiet, watching, to see how it would end up shaking out.

            “Sure,” Martin said, after a moment, barely sounding strained at all. “Yeah. Come with me, Jon.”

            “If you’d rather I slept in my own tent, I do have one,” Jon offered, but Martin shook his head.

            “No, there’s no good reason for it. It’s fine. Really. Come on.”

            The tent that Martin took him to was small for two people, but not too small. There were already two bedrolls laid out, and Martin flushed slightly as he pointed to the one on the right. “That’ll be yours,” he said. “D’you need anything else?”

            “I’ve been riding for twelve hours or so, I think,” Jon replied. “I’m just—I’ll just sleep.”

            “Great,” Martin said, then paused. “Um, listen. Don’t worry about Tim, okay? It’s not you he’s upset at, it’s me, and he, um, kind of has a reason to be. I’m sorry you’re getting caught up in it.”

            “It’s fine,” Jon told him distractedly. “I, erm. I’m not used to much human interaction, though, quite honestly, so if—” He paused, unsure how to voice the concern.

            “That’s okay,” Martin said quietly. “I like interacting with people, but I won’t bother you if you don’t want me to.”

            “No, I—” Jon tried again. “It’s not that. I just—people think I’m strange,” he confessed. Elias snorted quietly in his ear.

            “Stop flirting and go to bed, Jon,” he said flatly.

            Shaking his head slightly, Jon managed a thin smile. “Anyway. I should sleep.”

            “Yeah! Yeah, of course. Let me know if you need anything.”

            “Thanks,” Jon said again. He had barely the time to take off his boots and slip into the bedroll before his exhaustion claimed him utterly.

~

            The tent was alight with gold. Gold glittered along the lines of the flap seam, gold scintillated off the little motes of dry dust hanging in the air, and gold flashed deeply in Martin’s black eyes, as he looked over at Jon, who raised a hand.

            “Come here,” he said, in a voice that sounded strangely steady, and Martin did, sinking to his knees beside the bedroll where Jon was lying.

            “Did you, um, need something?” he asked.

            “I know you’ve been watching me.” Jon’s voice was soft, and Martin flinched slightly, a surprised, involuntary motion.

            “Why would I do that?” he asked, with a wide, ingenuous smile.

            Jon cocked his head to one side. “You tell me.” He reached out and ran a thumb across Martin’s bottom lip, relishing the sudden, shuddering breath it drew out of the other man.

            “I,” Martin tried. “Oh, okay, fine, I—”

            “I don’t mind.” Jon hooked a hand behind Martin’s head and drew him down until their faces were mere inches apart. “What do you want?”

            Throat working convulsively, Martin glanced down and to the side. “I’m pretty sure you know exactly what I want.”

            “I want you to ask me for it. I want to hear you ask.”

            “Gods. You’re such a—” Martin made an angry, choking noise. “I don’t know why I—all right. I want to kiss you. Can I kiss you?”

            “Please,” Jon whispered throatily, and Martin brought their lips together in a soft, slow kiss that started chastely and deepened into something decidedly less so. Martin’s hand slid through Jon’s hair, down the back of Jon’s neck, and when Jon finally pulled back, Martin gave a low, desperate whine. “Did you want something _else?_ ” Jon chuckled.

            “Oh, gods,” Martin whimpered hopelessly. “Yes. _Please_. I want you to—”

            It was dark. Dark, and Jon was panting, and he was _very_ hard. What the hell? He rolled upright and looked across the tent. In the faint light seeping through the tent seam, he could just make out a lump in the other bedroll that was presumably where Martin was sleeping. “Trouble sleeping?” Elias murmured.

            “What the _fire_ was that?” Jon drew his knees to his chest, flushing. He’d liked Martin on sight, yes, but he barely knew the man. And Jon didn’t—he just _didn’t_ —have this kind of dream about someone he didn’t know. Certainly not one that provoked such an obviously physiological reaction.

            “What was what?” Elias sounded genuinely curious, perhaps even concerned, and Jon abruptly felt icy shame rising in his stomach.

            “Nothing,” he said. “Never mind.” Grimly, he rolled over onto his side and firmly shut his eyes. It took longer this time, but eventually he did fall asleep again.


	3. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Their journey begins. Things go wrong almost immediately.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mildly spoilery chapter warnings at the end of the chapter.

            “Hey. Hey, Jon?”

            There was something soft on his shoulder. Jon shivered and flinched, squinting his eyes against the sudden influx of bright light. Then, groaning, he opened his eyes to see Martin looking down at him. “Guh?” he asked, intelligently.

            “We were thinking it would be good to get an early start,” Martin said cheerfully. “I figured I’d let you sleep as late as possible, but you probably still want time to eat and maybe shave.”

            “Umph,” Jon agreed sleepily.

            “When someone is kind to us, what do we say?” Elias whispered facetiously, and Jon barely restrained himself from swatting at the device on his neck as if it were a particularly irritating mosquito.

            “Thank you, Martin.” Jon’s muscles protested as he rolled over. Twelve hours on a horse and readying for another solid ride today. Not his favorite part of scholarly work. He got up slowly, considered changing his clothes, decided against it. He might as well save the two clean sets until he had had a chance to bathe. If they were heading for Maysklaro, it would probably be a possibility there. He might even have the chance to clean the set he was wearing.

            They ate cornmeal porridge with dried fruit before they struck camp. Martin flushed when Jon commented that it was delicious, gave him a surprisingly breathtaking smile, and then muttered thanks and that he had made it. Sasha caught Jon’s eye and gave him a wickedly knowing grin as she leaned sideways against Tim. Jon felt heat rising in his cheeks and looked away. Martin was nice, obviously, but he didn’t _know_ him. Not well. Not yet. Even if there was a thin thread inside him that _wanted_ to know him. He didn’t even think it was because of that dream, not really, unusual as it had been.

            There was just—something about Martin that made him want to look again. Something in that _calculated_ kindness, because Jon was already certain that no matter how much Martin wanted it to seem effortless, keeping a smile on his face, and now, currently, fussing around Sasha and Tim to make sure their broad-brimmed straw hats would keep out the sun enough, Jon was sure it wasn’t. And it made something inside him sing in response.

            They rode out beneath a shining blue sky that would have been more heartening if it hadn’t also gone along with an extremely hot sun beating down on them. It was a cheerful expedition though, and, although Jon didn’t speak much, he found his spirits buoyed up by the evidently comfortable chatter among the other three. Even Tim seemed in a better mood this morning. Elias kept up a sardonic mutter that only Jon could hear, but it wasn’t particularly mean-spirited, which was something of a first. They had been traveling together for some weeks now, and this was the first time Elias had seemed anything other than wholeheartedly scornful of anyone else Jon spent time with.

            The first problem of the day appeared when the bridge that Jon remembered crossing a particularly swift river turned out to no longer exist. Whether it had been swept away or some other disaster had befallen it, there was no obvious way to cross. At another time of year, they might have been able to ford, but it looked as if there had been rain in the mountains, because the river was swollen almost over its banks.

            They reined their horses in and inspected the situation. Tim made the pronouncement that Jon had already judged would be necessary—“We’re going to have to ride south until we find a place where it’s safe to cross.”

            “We could lose a lot of time doing that,” Sasha pointed out. “Oh, don’t look at me like that, Tim, I know we haven’t much choice. But I’m a little concerned about our water situation. I’d rather not trust the river water if we don’t have to. Don’t you remember how sick—”

            “Let’s go, then,” Tim interrupted, and Jon watched the way Sasha’s eyes went from Tim to Martin and tried to pretend that curiosity wasn’t flaming up inside him again, an ember that had been lit the previous night and that had never really been extinguished. Elias was oddly quiet, and he noted that as well. Data.

            Four or five miles downstream, the channel widened, and the rushing of the river settled slightly. “We can ford it,” Tim said. “Better than going too far downriver.”

            Jon’s eyes flickered across the blue-green of the water. “It looks quite deep,” he said cautiously, Elias murmuring an assent in his ear.

            “We can’t ride south all day, and it’s not turbulent.”

            Licking his lips in concern, Jon finally sighed and looked at Martin and Sasha. “We’ll take it slow,” Sasha offered, and Martin nodded, though his dark eyes were wide.

            They started across carefully, letting the horses pick their way slowly from rock to rock. After a few minutes, Elias said, “Wait. Careful, Jon.” Jon paused, reining in his horse. “To the left,” Elias told him, and Jon followed the voice, seeing the thick telltale streak of darkness where the riverbed must drop suddenly. And if it was that deep, the current might be stronger there as well.

            “Wait,” he started to say, but he was too late to stop it as Martin’s horse stepped forward directly over the blackness. It plunged downward instantly with a shriek, and a bubbling, swirling mess of white water surged up in its place.

            “ _Martin_!” Elias cried in Jon’s ear as Jon stared dumbly at the place the other man had disappeared.

            A moment later, his head broke the water again, significantly further downstream than Jon would have expected. The current must be strong there, then. Martin flailed, one arm reaching desperately for something, but it fell back into the water with no effect.

            “He can’t swim!” Sasha screamed, high and piercing above the sudden roaring of the water. Downstream, Martin’s dark head bobbed heartstoppingly beneath the water for a moment before reappearing.

            “Just give me a moment to think,” Elias said in Jon’s ear, but there _wasn’t_ a moment to think, if they left it any longer Martin would be gone, swept away down the river, gone so thoroughly it would be as if he’d never existed.

            “Damn,” Jon said tightly, because he _could_ swim, and it was better than nothing.

            “Jon, what are you—” Before Elias could finish, Jon had disengaged his feet from the stirrups and was sliding down the horse’s side. He hit the freezing water with a chill that sent a thousand pins and needles through him and reflexively gasped in a deep breath, filling his lungs with air, before plunging forward. He caught glimpses of the landscape, the high banded pink rock and sparse trees, glimpses of the churning white-and-grey water, but he did not lose sight of Martin’s terrified, flailing arms, and in just a few moments, he’d reached him.

            “Hold on to me,” Jon gasped, spitting water, suddenly aware of the heaviness of the waterlogged leather he was wearing. Martin’s arms fell across his torso, and Jon returned the hasty embrace, because they were truly in the current now and there was nothing to be done but try to keep their heads above water until the rapids evened out.

            The cold water sluiced across his face, barely letting him take one breath every minute or so. Several times, he tried to suck in air and got only water, and soon enough, he was so dizzy that he was no longer certain he could pinpoint which direction he needed to keep his face, although at least he could still feel Martin lodged in his arms. Just when he thought the two of them were going to go under for the last time, something struck him hard in the ribs, and the movement stopped abruptly. Martin gave a soft moaning noise at his shoulder.

            “You’re on the rocks,” Elias said. “Jon. _Jon_. You have to get to the bank.”

            Breathing was painful. Jon’s ribs ached sharply. Answering felt entirely impossible for the moment. “Jon, listen to me. You can’t stay there. You’ll be swept away if the current changes.”

            Elias was just going to keep talking. Jon didn’t have the strength left to protest, so he supposed he might as well do as he was told. Slinging an arm over Martin’s shoulders, he dragged them sideways along the rocks until he felt solid ground beneath his feet; then he took two steps and collapsed on the shore.

            Groaning, Jon turned his head to the side and threw up muddy water; then he lay on the sandy bank and breathed hard. Beside him, beneath his arm, he could feel Martin’s shoulders shaking as he vomited as well. “Are you all right?” Jon rasped after a moment, the words coming scratchily out of a painful throat.

            “Thanks to you,” Martin mumbled into the sand. “Think so, anyway.”

            “Right.” Slowly, Jon levered himself upright and looked around. The terrain wasn’t immediately recognizable, but he was fairly certain they couldn’t have gone that far, perhaps one or two bends in the river. Glancing up at the position of the sun, he saw they’d even managed to cross to the east side. So as disasters went, it could certainly have been worse. “All right. We should wait here or work our way north along the river, if you’re feeling up to it. If Sasha and Tim are sensible, they’ll be heading our direction.”

            “Urgh. Yeah. Give me a few minutes.” Martin ran a hand through his sodden hair and looked woefully down at his bow and quiver, and the sodden remnants of his pack. “I really hope those dry out. We’re going to need the provisions.”

            “Let’s worry about that once you’re feeling a little better,” Jon suggested. He found one hand stealing up to worry at the grey triangle beneath his ear, hoping like hell that Elias was waterproof.

            “I’m fine,” Elias said, in a soft voice. “I thought you two morons were going to die, but I’m fine.”

            “Hell.” Martin checked the tension in his bowstring. “I think it’s all right. It’s not like I’ve never gotten it wet before, but— _Jon_. _Shit._ ”

            “What?” Jon’s startled gaze followed Martin’s wildly gesticulating hand backwards to see three riders approaching quickly, the sun beating down on their yellow plastic suits and odd, elephantine masks.

            “Strangers!” Martin gasped, even as Elias said the same in a terse, low voice. “Come on, come on—”

            His hand was on Jon’s, dragging him up and into a flat-out run south down the river, but it was no use, Jon thought, they couldn’t possibly outrun riders on horseback, and there was nowhere to take cover, nowhere to go, except—

            The sound of a bow twanging cut through the relative silence of the riverbank, and something hit Jon hard in the shoulder. He toppled forward with a gasp, feet already knocked out from under him.

            “Shit!” Martin screamed. “Jon— _shit_!” From his position on the ground, Jon could see him turn on his heel, drop his pack, and gather an arrow out of his quiver in one smooth motion. Everything went silent again as Martin raised his bow, sighted along it, and let an arrow fly. It struck the lead rider square in the chest, and they clutched at it, losing their grip on the reins. The horse swerved into the path of the second rider, but the third was still coming, and there was no way that Martin could pull his bow back quickly enough, no way to stop the approaching rider pulling a wicked-looking knife out of their belt. Elias swore under his breath, and Jon was reaching forward to at least pull Martin down to the ground, make him less of a target, when there was an odd, rustling, whispering noise behind them.

            The rider pulled up so suddenly their horse reared back, and Martin swung halfway round. “Oh, my gods,” he said. “Oh, my—”

            Something struck Jon’s shoulder, sending pain rushing like lightning through his limbs, and everything melted away in a surge of colorful dots.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for near-drowning


	4. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific warnings at the end.

            Jon’s shoulder hurt, and it was moving. He could feel the flesh rippling and distending, but he was certain he was completely limp. Another moment’s cogitation made him realize there was a…rustling, chewing noise near his ear, and he sat up with a yell, reaching for his shoulder.

            “Jon, _no_!” Elias’s voice shouted, and he froze.

            “Oh, dear, no, no, don’t do that,” said an unfamiliar voice, and he looked up, squinting through dim light, to see a figure in a long, pinkish dress moving towards him. “Don’t disturb them, shhh, now, you’re going to be fine.” She spoke in an odd, rasping singsong, and as she stooped over him, Jon’s heart thumped, heavy and sore, in his chest. The cluster of little sharp bumps along one cheek suggested she had one of the flesh-eating diseases that sometimes ravaged their way through villages before burning out, but there was more. Down the other cheek, along her neck, and across her right shoulder the flesh was softly heaving, and there was a large, round hole at the base of it, from which protruded three white, segmented bodies waving in the air.

            “What—oh, gods.” Jon’s stomach heaved, and he tried very hard not to be sick.

            “They’ll knit you right back up,” the woman said. “Don’t you worry.”

            “What did you do to me?” Jon gasped.

            “I put the little ones inside you to bind you up. It shouldn’t be much longer now. Oh, there’s the first of them.” He followed her gaze and rather wished he hadn’t. There was a white, bulbous head protruding from the tacky flesh, and, as he watched, the rest of the worm followed suit, wriggling out and down his arm. It put its head up in the air, waving little legs around in a rather questing manner, and the woman made a soft clucking sound and carefully held out one finger for it to climb onto. “The other two will follow shortly. Just hold still.”

            Jon swallowed very hard and tried not to think about the fact that there were _worms_ moving _inside him_.

            “Is he all right?” Martin’s voice said worriedly from the tent entrance.

            “He’ll be just fine,” the woman said in a satisfied voice. “My little ones are taking good care of him.”

            “I’m all right, Martin,” Jon managed, although he could tell his voice was shaking slightly. “Given that I—just took an arrow to the shoulder, I’m in surprisingly little pain.” He decided not to mention the nauseating wriggling sensation that appeared to have replaced the pain.

            “Can I come in, at least?”

            “Just a moment,” the woman said, holding out her finger. “Almost done.” Two more squirming bodies writhed out of Jon’s shoulder; as the last one exited, it left behind a thick, gluey residue, a paler patch on his already pale skin, but there was no other visible sign of injury. “All right, all done.” Jon’s stomach heaved again as one of the worms wriggled into a round hole in the center of the woman’s finger, but he ignored it in favor of asking the question, “What— _are_ they?”

            The woman chuckled. “They’re fleshworms,” she said brightly. “They eat dead tissue and weave living flesh from it.”

            “May I?” Jon asked, reaching for her hand.

            “ _Jon_!” Martin jumped between them. “It might—you can’t just touch her—what if it’s contagious?”

            Jon stared at Martin, then looked down at his shoulder. “I, er, think that horse is already gone,” he said, and Martin flushed, then looked back to the woman.

            “I’m sorry, I didn’t—mean to be rude?”

            “Oh, that’s all right, dear.” She tipped her head to one side, and a worm poked its head out of her mouth and nibbled at the side of her smile. “I’m Jane, by the way.”

            “How _do_ they work, though?” Jon asked. Now that he was looking carefully, he could see that her entire skin was a patchwork of slightly different colors, even where there was no evidence of current insectile activity.

            Jane shrugged. “When I was quite a little girl, I got very sick, and my parents had too many children to take care of anyway, so they left me outside. I wandered around in the desert for a long time, and then I fell asleep in a garbage heap. When I woke up, the worms were taking care of me. At least I think that’s what happened. It’s how I remember it today, anyway.” She hummed softly, and Jon’s eyes slid up to see that the side of her head was also wriggling very slowly. If it was true that the seat of the soul was in the brain, then…He shuddered, but he also found himself wondering if someone with a less extensive infestation would be a potential target for _testing_ that particular theory. If you had one person with the worms in their head and one without, then perhaps—

            “If we had a whole group of them, what a delightful stable of test subjects they would be,” Elias murmured in his ear, and Jon disguised his laugh as a cough.

            “Well,” he said awkwardly. “Thank you.” He poked an exploratory finger at his shoulder.

            “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, dear,” Jane told him. “It will be fragile at first. It stiffens quickly, though. Of course, I don’t really know what happens if you don’t have any of your own worms, but I’m sure they knew what they were doing.”

            “Right,” Jon said, a little limply. His shoulder did feel strange—moving it was difficult; the arm shook and there was a tingling numbness localized near the joint. Still, at least it didn’t hurt, and at least he _could_ move it. And at this point, he realized, he was surprisingly hungry. “Er. Jane? Do you have anything we could eat?”

~

            The sun was slipping below the horizon. As it turned out, Jon had been unconscious for most of the day as the worms worked on repairing the damage the arrow had done to his shoulder. Thankfully, the food Jane was able to provide turned out to be thick cornbread smothered with spicy peppers, rather than anything to do with worms or meat. Jon wasn’t entirely certain he could have stomached a meat-based meal right now, with the thought of those wriggling creatures happily chewing through bits of Jane’s flesh still fresh in his mind.           

            Elias was moodily silent; Martin awkwardly so. He’d thanked Jon for saving his life, and Jon had—well, he wasn’t sure if he’d handled it well or not. He had handled it, he supposed. It had been so long since he had spent this length of time in anyone’s company. Elias was, in some ways, the first companion he had had in years. And Jon didn’t feel as if he had done anything particularly praiseworthy. He had barely thought about diving after Martin; it had needed to be done, and frankly it was little more than sheer luck that they hadn’t both drowned.

            Now, in the light of a warm fire, he was trying to forget about all of it. Somehow, his pack had not only made the journey down the river with him, but his notebook, inkstone and a single brush had survived unscathed in their waterproof pouch. He drew them out, running his hands over the soft cover, lingering on the smooth wood of the brush, before he opened it to the most recent translation he had been attempting and settled in with only the crackle of the fire for company.

            “What’s that?” Martin’s voice jogged Jon out of the semi-haze he had been working in. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

            “No, it’s fine.” Jon’s voice came out hoarse, and he coughed, clearing his throat. “It’s—ehm.” He hadn’t even showed this work to Elias; not deliberately, at any rate. “I sometimes do translation work to calm myself down. This is from several thousand years ago. Well after we presume the Center would have been established—” He caught himself. “Sorry, you’d know that.”

            “It’s okay. If you don’t want to show me, I—um, it’s fine? I get that translations can be personal.”

            In the flickering firelight, Martin’s face was open and welcoming, and Jon felt an unusual pull toward him. How many other scholars had he actually been able to spend time with? Not enough. “No,” he said haltingly. “No, that’s—please.” And he scooted slightly to the side. The bright relief dawning on Martin’s face made him wilt a little (there was so _much_ there; Jon had forgotten how intense feelings could get when another person was involved), but when Martin sat, it wasn’t close enough for their arms to touch, and he waited until Jon held out the worn book filled with careful brush strokes to put a hand underneath it and help support it.

            On the left side of the page, Jon had painstakingly copied out the original song as he’d found it in the Santio library, the old, broken mix of strange syllables. On the right, he had just begun the translation. So far, he had the title and the first line. _Image? (pl.) - > Images/ cats [gen.]-> Images of Cats. _

_[Word that denotes a large quantity] [small] baby cat (pl.) to see or view (imp.) that the small-baby-cats are moving quickly - > Many small kittens, see them as they race.            _

“Well,” Martin said, looking at it.

            “I know,” Jon sighed. “It looks absurd.”

            “No! Well…I mean, yes, but I don’t think it’s you. I mean, I don’t think I’d have translated it much differently. It’s not a very easy thing to do. And if it’s a song, maybe it’s just a nonsense one.”

            “Yes, but…” Jon pointed mutely down to the line in the center that he had underlined three times, and Martin sucked in his lip.

            “The Center cannot hold,” he read. “Oooh boy.” He scooted slightly closer; Jon wondered if it was unconscious, and then he stopped thinking about that as Martin turned his shining face up and Jon almost forgot to breathe for some reason. “Look down here,” he said, tracing his finger along the dried brush-strokes. “This word is ‘power’ or ‘energy’, isn’t it?”

            “Yes,” Jon agreed. “I’d missed that. I must have been in a bit of a trance when I transcribed it.”

            “Very good, Martin,” Elias breathed, and Martin blinked and looked over.

            “Did you say something, Jon?” he asked.

            “Don’t,” Elias said warningly, even more quietly, in Jon’s ear, and Jon, who had almost forgotten, almost happily delivered up all their secrets for Martin to see, shook his head.

            “Nothing,” he said. “No.” His finger was shaking slightly as he ran it beneath the letters, hovering beneath _energy_ / _power_. “The cats…move away from the energy?” he hazarded, and Martin squinted at it as well. “I think it’s the other way round?” he said uncertainly. “The energy moves away from them? Does that make any sense?”

            “They _release_ it,” Jon said hoarsely. “No, wait. Bounces off. _Reflects_.” He scanned down a few more lines. “They make you see it,” he said breathlessly. “The cats make you see the power, beware the powerful cats?”

            “I think that’s literal,” Martin offered, leaning sideways and squinting at the page. “Full of power, or full of energy?”

            “Images of cats,” Jon muttered, and he slid his finger down to the next line, where Martin’s finger was already hovering, and they collided, a tiny brush of warmth that somehow felt as stimulating as an electric shock. “Oh, ah,” he stammered. Martin didn’t seem to have noticed; his finger was still running down the page, and the log they were sitting on was vibrating slightly as he drummed his feet happily against it.

            It took Jon a long moment to gather his egregiously scattered thoughts, but he managed it. “It’s like that old fairytale,” he said slowly. “The one about the boy who goes to save his sister, but there’s a…a ‘cat the color of the sun’ who tells him to turn back, and when he ignores it, he ends up ‘descending into flame.’ If ‘cat the color of the sun’ doesn’t mean yellow but instead means that it’s _glowing_?”

            Martin nodded slowly. “They make you see the power. They reflect the power. So otherwise…the energy is invisible?”

            “The release of energy is a form of risk, but you can’t even _see_ it, normally?” Jon shook his head. “This is…interesting. But we’ll have to be careful.”

            “Yeah,” Martin agreed, and then he sighed heavily. “I’ve always known the Center was dangerous,” he said quietly. “Well, as long as I really knew that it existed, I guess. I didn’t know much about anything till I was about twelve. But I still always wanted to find it, and I—” He shut his mouth with a snap. “I should’ve stopped him,” he mumbled. “Going off by himself like that.” Jon wasn’t sure if Martin was still talking to him, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do.

            “Put your arm around him,” Elias whispered from a long distance away, and Jon, hesitantly, did. Martin turned his face into Jon’s shoulder and gave a dry sob.

            “Thanks,” he mumbled, and Jon, on his own initiative, looked down and pushed a stray curl out of Martin’s eyes.

            “Of course,” he replied softly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for body horror of the parasitism/WORMS variety, ie rather standard Jane Prentiss.
> 
> Thanks to Kyros for the idea of "flesh silk."


	5. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which they reach Maysklaro.

            He was standing next to Martin, staring up into a black night sky studded with stars. The fire had long since burned down to nothing. “There, you see that?” he asked quietly, pointing to the bright dot rising above the eastern horizon.

            “Yeah,” Martin agreed.

            “That is Kimah,” he told Martin. “There’s an old saying in the place where I was born, _To Center from Trine/Does Kimah Shine_. I always wondered if it meant that if you traced the arc that Kimah makes at the right time of year, whether it would truly point to the Center.”

            “But it’ll change, won’t it? The arc that it’s making?”

            He nodded. “Yes. I think the couplet is incomplete, perhaps part of a longer poem that used to tell the answer. But I do think it means that the Center is somewhere west or southwest of Lasalama. It’s a start. Actually, it’s where I first started. The first time I heard that poem, I wanted to know more about Kimah, about Trine, about Center.”

            “How old were you?” Martin asked.           

            “I don’t know. Four or five? My parents were still alive. I’ve always been a scholar.”

            “Wow,” Martin said in a hushed voice. “Um, sounds nice.” There was a pensive tone to his voice, and Jon didn’t want to press, but somehow he found himself asking anyway, “Has that not been your experience?” the burning, pricking desire to _know_ pushing the words through his mouth.

            Shifting on the sand beneath his feet, Martin stared at Kimah. “No,” he said quietly.

            The sound of shouting made Jon turn, and when he turned, the high dome of the night sky flickered away to be replaced with the low, uneven roof of the tent Jane had offered to him and Martin. They’d been so tired that they hadn’t really put it up very well. Groaning, Jon started to roll over and realized there was something warm at his front preventing him from being able to do so.

            The warm thing made a soft, sleepy noise, and he realized that it was Martin, that the two of them were tucked into the only remaining serviceable sleeping roll that had survived their unpleasant trip down the river. That he’d been dreaming. Dreaming about something so sharply and clearly he could still feel the stinging chill of the night wind on his face.

            Before he could make up his mind about what to do, someone yanked the tent flap open, letting in a wash of sunlight. “Get up,” demanded the woman standing outside, holding a steady, loaded crossbow pointing directly at the two of them.

            “Muh?” Martin said, as Jon shook his shoulder carefully.

            “Just a minute,” he told the woman outside. “We were both asleep, it’ll take—”

            “Just get up and come out here.” She was a tall woman, wearing the typical fringed leather of a Huntress. Jon grabbed Martin and bodily tugged his sleepy friend upright.

            “Whuh?” Martin mumbled, and then he seemed to finally blink his eyes open and give a little squeak. “Oh, shit, what _now_?”

            At least the Huntress waited patiently enough for the two of them to stumble out of the tent. “James!” the woman hollered, still holding the point of her crossbow on Jon and Martin. “James, these your friends, or do I need to shoot them?”

            “Oh, god, Daisy, please don’t shoot them; yes, that’s Martin and Jon. Don’t you rec—” She cut herself off from saying something. “Um. Yeah, that’s them.” Jon felt Martin sag with relief against him as Sasha appeared, looking none the worse for wear than she had when they’d seen her just the day before.

            “We thought you were done for,” Sasha confessed, as she embraced Martin and held out a hand for Jon to squeeze, which he did, awkwardly, at Elias’s prompting. “We thought you’d drowned, but Melanie, Daisy, and Basira agreed to try to track you, and they found the Stranger corpse. Martin, that was you, wasn’t it?”

            Martin ducked his head sheepishly. “Um, yeah.”

            “Really nice shot, too,” Sasha enthused. “But all the blood—where’d all that blood come from?”

            “Me,” Jon said, with a sigh. “I took an arrow to the shoulder. Fortunately, Jane—wait—where _is_ Jane? Your Huntresses didn’t kill her, did they?”

            “The, um, the worm lady?” Sasha asked. “No—no one quite wanted to touch her. We did ask about you, but she just laughed and said something about worm food. Tim got a bit—well, she’s fine, I didn’t let him do anything to her, but that’s why Daisy is stalking around ready to take someone’s head off. She doesn’t much like Tim, but she _does_ like an excuse to be aggressive, I’m afraid.”

            “I think she saved my life,” Jon said guardedly. “At the very least, my shoulder is significantly less injured than it would have been without her.”

            Sasha nodded seriously. “I’ll make sure they don’t bother her. Martin—I think Tim was quite worried.”

            Scratching the back of his head, Martin nodded awkwardly. “I’ll talk to him,” he mumbled, in a way that made Jon suspect he was missing something. Elias was almost conspicuously silent.

            Over the course of the next few minutes, Jon found himself being introduced to Daisy—which was awkward—to Basira and Melanie—a bit less so, although the way the three Huntresses acted as a primarily closed group that only occasionally seemed to allow in Sasha and no one else was somewhat offputting. Not that Jon could say much, as he still hadn’t even told any of them about Elias.

            “Oh, thank god,” Tim said as soon as he saw Martin. “ _Martin_.” He took two steps towards Martin, and then stopped awkwardly, shifting from foot to foot. “I—” he cleared his throat. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “We should have looked for another crossing.” Then, pinching his mouth a little, he looked over to Jon. “Thanks,” he said. “For—keeping Martin safe. Thanks.”

            “Interesting,” Elias murmured.

            “You’re welcome,” Jon responded automatically, also shuffling a little awkwardly.

            Tim gave him a nod and half-smile and put out a hand.

            Although he was surprised, Jon managed to respond by sticking out his own and shaking it. It was awkward, sweaty, and quickly over, but Martin gave them both a bemused smile, and somehow that made it worth it.

~

            Jon didn’t know if the lights or the noise of Maysklaro were more shocking. Of course he had lived here, once, but it was long ago, and he had spent so long traveling from tiny village to tiny village that he had almost forgotten what a bustling, seething mass of humanity could be like.

            The three Huntresses spread out in a rough triangle around himself, Martin, Tim, and Sasha. Sasha was laughing and chattering with them, although she held Tim’s hand tightly, and Jon thought Daisy might have given the two of them several ugly glances. But then, it was difficult for Jon to tell anything from behind the haze of headache induced by the sudden noise of the crowd, which felt almost like a physical wall he was trying to fight his way through.

            Although the sun had set perhaps an hour before and the sky above was dark, not a single star was visible, and if Elias had tried to say anything to him, Jon hadn’t been able to hear it.

            “I always miss this so much!” Sasha shouted, somewhere in the vicinity of Jon’s ear, and he winced, not certain whether he needed to nod along or not. Everything was taken on a vaguely unreal tint, the strange sensation of his senses feeding into a central location that he was somehow barely able to access.

            “Jon?” Martin said hesitantly, brushing gentle fingers across his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

            “I’ll be fine,” Jon snapped in response, and Martin withdrew quickly, sending a pang of guilt through the approximation of Jon’s chest, but given the distance between him and that part of his anatomy, there was little he felt capable of doing about it.

            After another few minutes, everything seemed to have devolved into a vague, impossible to interpret roaring sound. Jon rubbed a tired hand across his eyes, hoping they were going to make it to an inn soon, but cracking his eyelids open showed him a few still, grainy pictures of the others apparently enjoying themselves. Sasha clutching Tim’s hand as she pulled him towards a street vendor, the flickering light of the torches turning her face an eerie orange-yellow. The triangle warped and broken for a moment as Daisy slid a possessive arm around Basira’s waist and kissed her cheek. Martin’s face turned up, striped with shadow.  

            “I think Jon could use a bit of a lie-down,” Martin’s voice said, a little broken up across Jon’s distant perceptions.

            “Oh, he does look pale.” Sasha. “Tim, I’m a bit tired, too. I’ll take Martin and Jon to find an inn and you can catch up? I know how much you love the bazaar.”

            “Someone’s got to keep an eye on the Huntresses, I suppose. Go on, then.”

            A hand on Jon’s upper arm was steering him carefully now, and he didn’t bother to resist. The flickering lights were doing rather peculiar things to the pictures in front of his eyes. He stumbled unresistingly past a group of wax folk, people who worshipped the Wide Father. Rumor had it they sacrificed children to the Grifwigo, generally boys, was what Jon had heard. Young ones, small if possible. Some kind of fragmentary holy text about fiery ghosts and walking beyond death. Thus far, Jon hadn’t been able to find out much else. They were notoriously secretive, and even during his trip to the Grifwigo, he’d never run across a group of them. One of them looked up as he went past, smiling a smile too wide for her face. A swollen mass of flesh at the corner of her mouth contributed to the impression and reminded Jon with a visceral sense of disgust of the reason they were called “wax people.”

            The noise of the outside diminished a little as Martin steered him inside a low building, the thick adobe walls an effective barrier. “Jon,” Elias murmured, as the heavy door shut behind them and the noise subsided a little. “Be careful. I think we’re being followed.”

            “Followed?”

            Martin’s gentle hand left his arm. “Sasha and I’ll go see if we can get a few rooms. You just wait here.”

            “They’re subtle,” Elias said, as Jon leaned tiredly against the wall. “But I’m fairly certain. One of them has quite distinctive hands.”

            “Why would anyone want to follow _us_?”

            “That is certainly a question, but I’m not sure it’s one that has a pleasant answer. Be careful, Jon.”

            Martin hurried back. “All right, we’ve managed three rooms. Are you okay sharing with me? Otherwise, I can always bunk down with Tim and Sasha.”

            “It’s fine, Martin. I don’t mind.”

            The worried frown evaporated slowly from Martin’s face, and he grinned. “Great. Good. Okay.”

            “I…do think I’d better lie down, though,” Jon told him. His legs were wobbling, and the smell of warm bread and ale, which should have made him hungry, just left him feeling slightly nauseous. Martin stepped a little closer, putting a hand on Jon’s shoulder and peering intently up into his face. For some reason, Elias made a soft noise in Jon’s ear.

            “You’re not looking great,” Martin agreed. “All right, let’s get you round to the room. It’s in the back.” He held up a small, silver key.

            Jon followed Martin and Sasha tiredly out another door. Stepping outside again was a little surreal. They were no longer on the main road, so the noise was muted, but the pebbles of the path beneath their feet shone white in the ambient lights, the coarse sand to either side of it and the high sharp hedges hemming them in, dark and foreboding. Elias’s warning echoed loudly in his head.

            “Wait,” he said. “It’s…it’s awfully dark.”

            Martin paused on the path. “Jon?” he said uncertainly, taking a step back towards him. And then a huge hand reached out of the darkness at the side of the path, covering Martin’s mouth and yanking him back before he could make a single noise.

            “Martin!” Jon leapt towards the place he had disappeared, but before he could even catch sight of his friend again, something caught him around the throat, dragging him forward into the same darkness Martin had disappeared into.

 


	6. Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jon, Martin, and Sasha are kidnapped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Potentially spoilery warnings at the end.

            The stink of incense was heavy in the air, and the small room was lined with candles on the walls. There was almost a pattern in the arrangement, but whenever Jon looked too closely or looked away so that he could only see them with the corner of his eyes, they seemed to crawl about like flightless fireflies. There was a steady, rhythmic drumbeat coming from nowhere Jon could discern.

            The three of them had been forced to their knees by silent figures whose faces were obscured by heavy cowls. A knife tickled at Jon’s throat, and in front of him, Martin, and Sasha, the man who was presumably the leader was walking slowly back and forth.

            There was something very off about his movements. It wasn’t just the size of his enormous hands; his entire body was lengthened, as if someone had molded a normal human being out of clay and then stretched. He wore a long, garishly colored tunic with a number of eye-searing repetitive patterns stitched into it.

            “Ah, scholars,” crooned the elongated figure. “Delicious.”

            The smoke stung Jon’s eyes and made him cough. Beside him, Sasha was tense but ferocious. “We’re under the protection of Uvera. You wouldn’t dare harm us.”

            The thing took Jon’s face in its hand, brushing a hideously twisted, bumpy thumb over his cheekbone in the process. “We will be well paid for the delivery of the bodies,” it murmured. “And our god will feast on your minds. Bring the potion.”

            The last was clearly an instruction. More dark-clad figures moved around behind him. After a moment, one of them handed him a wooden bowl decorated with hypnotic, swirling spirals. He pressed it to Jon’s lips. Jon tried to turn away, but could not; he was held tightly and the knife was a constant, pricking reminder that there was no escape here.

            “Drink it,” the creature said, its smile entirely too wide for its mouth. At Jon’s ear, Elias was utterly silent, and the point of the knife slid cold across Jon’s throat. No choice, he thought clinically. No real choice, at any rate. He bowed his head and opened his mouth, and the man tipped the wooden bowl upward so liquid ran across his tongue. The taste was so bitter that he gagged and tried to jerk away without meaning to, but those long hands were obscenely strong and held his chin up tightly enough to bruise as he swallowed. Only once there was nothing left in the bowl was he allowed to gasp and fall back onto his knees, his stomach heaving. Beside him, Martin and Sasha were coughing and sputtering as well.

            “Now,” the creature with the warped hands said, stepping back. “Behold our angel.”

            The beat of the drum was sounding faster and faster, and it echoed the thudding of Jon’s heart. And it was—he could _see_ it, a bursting orange-red pulse at the edge of his eyelids. There was a long-drawn-out laugh that seemed to go on and on, rising high and piping and mustard-yellow. There was a checkerboard stretching out beneath Jon, undulating beneath his knees so that he thought he might throw up from seasickness. Martin was crying, and lines flowed from his mouth as he did so, coiling up like little snakes and then flattening out into triangles. One triangle forced its way into another, then another followed it, and another and another. It felt as if Jon had swallowed broken glass, and he moaned. The triangles laughed, a soft, bright chittering noise.

            A door opened, coffin-shaped and oozing darkness around the sides. Scuttling in with the darkness came a vast, bulbous form crowned with eight glittering bile-sour eyes. Repeated jagged patterns swirled around its body; Jon tasted blood as Martin started screaming.

            “Run!” Elias’s voice was full of broken glass, too. “Runrun _run_ run!” The words blurred into a meaningless buzzing noise, but Martin was still screaming. Staggering to his feet, Jon made his way across the shifting floor to Martin and Sasha as the shifting shadow advanced on them.

            “Jon.” This time Elias’s voice sounded strangely clear, cutting through the buzzing, bubbling sour-sweet haze over everything. “Can you hear me?”

            Yes, Jon tried to say, but all he heard was a garbled, fetid mess.

            “Your options are to try to strike out without a weapon or to try and take the energetic prongs your opponent is carrying. Can you do that?” Laughter, tinny and eerie. “Jon, I can tell you what to do. All you have to do is trust me and do exactly as I tell you.”

            Trust you? The vast dark shape was undulating nearer, and Martin’s screams echoed, waving in the air like the warped, pitted surface of an ancient mirror Jon had once seen.

            “Or I suppose you could all die,” Elias snarled, sharper than Jon had perhaps ever heard him. “God’s sake, Jon.”           

            Trust him. Trust the enigmatic voice in his ear, the creature who swore he had a map to the Center. Wasn’t Jon already trusting him with that? And yet, the little grey piece of electronic jewelry held countless secrets, bursting at its seams like a bag of baby spiders. It was hot; Jon was so hot that he could barely force shivering muscles to move.

            “ _Jon_.”

            Right. Trust Elias. Yeah. He could do that. Trust him to find the Center, to cut through all the wavering unreality, lies, distorted, engorged echoes of the many years. “Two steps forward, reach out to full extension, move your hand sharply to the left, and grasp,” Elias rapped out, and Jon’s body did something. Maybe that. Possibly that. Hopefully that. “Push down your thumb, then retract your arm and step backwards.”

            A high, dry, salty crackle ripped the air beside Jon, but he was already stepping backwards, falling against soft, yielding flesh beneath him. Muddled voices murmured with the snapping of tiny bones underneath his feet. Jon tasted yellow. The triangles multiplied, pelting him with tiny stings like little bees.

            What now? he wondered, hoping he was wondering it somewhere that Elias could hear.

            “Open your hand, take two steps to the left, reach out to your left and your right.” The triangles were squeaking happily now, sharp green little points embedding themselves in Jon’s flesh, but he tried to do as he was told. Navigating across the still-roiling floor was unpleasant and strangely pink. When he reached out, what he felt beneath his hands was something like wax, gooey and hot, but he held still, waiting for another instruction.

            “Damn,” Elias said. “Damn, I don’t—there’s no _time_ —” A sudden loud noise reverberated sweetly through Jon’s spine. Elias’s voice changed a little as he spoke again. “Jon, get on your knees.” There were flying snakes twining around over Jon’s head as he did as he was told, calling to each other in spongy voices. “Can you see Martin?” Elias asked, quite quietly, and Jon squinted at the form in front of him. Too many eyes, too many legs, twitching like a dying spider, but something about the taste or the shape of the sounds said Martin to Jon, so he nodded. “Put your arms around him,” Elias said, his voice oddly monotonous. “Hold him.”

            Ignoring the purple-yellow sensation of twitching underneath his arms, Jon tried. The buzzing of the triangles grew louder and louder, until his face was wet with incandescent tears. “You’re safe,” Elias said. “It’s all right. Well, unless the Huntresses all die, I suppose, but that seems unlikely.”

            Risking a glance up showed Jon that the vast spider was surrounded by three crunchy ivory-covered skeletons, on whose antlers still hung a few scraps of velvet. The triangles inside him vibrated uncomfortably. “Just hold on,” Elias told him. “Just stay still, Jon. It’s all right. You did very well.” Jon didn’t think the triangles agreed with Elias, but his limbs felt as heavy as lead, so he didn’t bother to try to protest. He wasn’t sure he could have even if he’d wanted to.

            Time melted, then. Jon wanted it to stop, but it wouldn’t do that; it just moved on in strange fits and impossible starts. The skeletons moved from chittering in high voices as they danced a clockwork dance at blurry speeds to a frozen, motionless tableau. Above them, the stars rolled across a liquid sky. The bright pink one that beckoned to him was Kimah.

            And then, slowly, the stars dripped away and Jon was staring up at a suspiciously triangle-free ceiling. Someone had taken off his shirt and covered him in a rough blanket, but his trousers felt gritty and sticky. Groaning, he rolled onto his side and found himself pressed into warm flesh. Startled, he scooted backward enough to realize he was sharing the bed with a naked back, brown, speckled with darker patches, one or two raised birthmarks, and a crisp black image tattooed at the base of the neck. It took Jon a moment to parse the black ring behind the three wider unfinished curves, but when he did, he swore breathlessly and nearly fell out of the bed.

            He knew that symbol. The cult of the Great Spider, Faylik Nashjay, maintained that once she was freed of the sickness sent to her by the Wide Father of the wax folk, she would once again spin a web to pull the world back to safety, but Jon’s opinion was that, god or not, anything that required child sacrifice was something he wanted to stay well away from.

            “Jon, it’s all right,” Elias said in his ear, but before Jon could decide whether to believe him, Martin rolled over on the bed, blinking sleepily.

            “Jo-on?” he tried. Then, shivering, he reached for the blanket, which must have slipped down to his waist at some point, and froze. Part of Jon was still recoiling in concern from the spider’s mark, but another part—admittedly voyeuristic, but then they were both scholars together, were they not? He hoped they were—was cataloguing the different patterns on Martin’s skin, the patches of freckles, the large round dark birthmark sitting almost on his suprasternal notch, and the jagged pink-white scar running horizontally across the width of his chest.

            “It’s—” Martin clutched at the blanket, pulling it up to his chin. “Um.” He looked to the side. “You saw the tattoo, didn’t you?”

            Jon, who had been distracted by the sudden strong desire to reach out and tug down the blanket so he could keep looking, wrenched his mind back to the thing that had caused him to recoil. “Yes,” he said.

            “Yeah…” Martin’s shoulders slumped a little. “I’m not—I’m a scholar of the Eye, through and through,” he said. “I’ve never gotten rid of it because, well, I don’t know, it just never seemed like the right time? Um. When I was a kid my mother sold me to the Spider’s Cult. Um.”

            “Oh.” Jon blinked rapidly in confusion. “Wait…why?”

            “Oh, as a sacrifice,” Martin said, waving his hand and looking a little blank. “Oh, why’d she sell me? Um, well, she got sick, and she needed medicine, and my f-father had, well, he’d left, so I guess. Um. I don’t really know, honestly, it’s not like she sat me down and explained it to me.”

            “Gods,” Jon said. His grandmother had been distant, when he was growing up, he supposed. He’d known other families that were more dysfunctional than that, but for Martin’s own mother to have _sold_ him to be _sacrificed_ —“I’m sorry,” he managed, after a moment. “That— _that_ happened to you. I’m sorry.”

            Martin looked up at him, pushing the corners of his mouth up, though he wasn’t really smiling. “I’m fine,” he said. “Are you okay? Wait a minute, I’ve just realized—I thought I was going to actually be sacrificed to—” He took in a sharp, short breath. “What happened? Why aren’t we dead?”

            It took Jon some concentration to keep himself from reaching up to touch the cool metal housing of Elias’s jewelry. “Thank you,” Elias murmured in his ear. Once again, Jon wondered why it seemed to be _quite_ so important to him to remain undetected, but it was hardly the time for an interrogation. Instead, he lifted and lowered one shoulder and truthfully said, “I don’t quite know what happened. It was—not coherent.”

            “No,” Martin agreed, with a faint smile. “No, I guess I wouldn’t say that it was coherent.”

            “Eloquent as ever,” Elias muttered in Jon’s ear, and Jon nearly slapped him. Before he could decide whether to remove him out of spite, the door opened and Sasha hurried in.

            “Are you both feeling all right?” she asked breathlessly. “I think I got less of a dose, because my brain’s been—well, not all right, but it stopped being impossible to tell what was going on about an hour ago.” Her gaze lingered on Martin for a long moment, and she tried for a lopsided smile.

            “The triangles are gone,” Jon reported, with a sigh. “I suppose that’s an upside.” In his ear, Elias was muttering something about ‘not giving him that look, James,’ which made no sense, so Jon elected to ignore it.

            “Do _you_ know what happened?” Martin asked Sasha.

            “According to Melanie, she and the others caught up with us just in time to see Jon dropping a set of energetic prongs he’d apparently used on one of the members of the Spider Cult. I—I’m not sure, but I think you saved Martin, Jon. Anyways, the Huntresses got us out all right, and we’ve been recovering ever since.”

            “You’re welcome,” Elias murmured in Jon’s ear. “You _did_ do very well under rather trying circumstances.”

            Jon breathed through his nose to avoid yanking out the damn jewelry. It was just like Elias to continue talking to him when talking back would almost certain give him away, _especially_ when one of the main reasons Jon hadn’t yet told any of the others about him at this point was at Elias’s own request.

            “So, uh…” Martin trailed off. “Was—was there _actually_ a spider? And the man with the—with the _hands_ —he said they’d be well-paid for the delivery of the bodies? What was going on with that?”

            Sasha shook her head unhappily. “Tim’s worried about that, too,” she said. “I can’t get the Huntresses to tell me if the spider was real or not, although if we all saw it…maybe? And besides that, we don’t know who kidnapped us or even why, really.”

            “Fantastic,” Jon put in sourly. “Perhaps we could move on as rapidly as possible, then?”

            “Yeah.” Sasha sighed. “If someone’s trying to get to us for some reason—maybe they’ve realized what we know, although I don’t know how they could have, but…yeah, we should probably move on. I’ll let Tim know. I doubt he’ll be pleased, but—” She sighed. “Don’t worry, you two.” She was focusing on Martin as she spoke, and he pulled a face at her.

            “I’m fine, I’m not made of glass, you know.”

            “Oh, Martin, of course not.” Sasha moved uneasily from foot to foot. “It’s just, ever since—”

            “Don’t,” Martin cut in. “I know what you’re going to say, and I know I’ve been—a little off, but…”

            “What if we get to the Center, and you don’t—”

            Jon had the weird sensation of watching a conversation occurring in a different language.

            “That’s not going to happen,” Martin said stubbornly. “Sasha, I know you’re worried, okay? I’d—I’d be worried, too. But I promise you I know what I’m doing.”

            “I just don’t want you getting hurt again,” she said, but she nodded. “But you’re right. It’s your business. I’ll let you handle it.”

            “Thank you,” Martin said, and Jon felt him shiver slightly beside him. “Sasha, I…” He gulped in a deep breath. “Thanks for always being there for me.”

            “Of course, Martin.”

            Jon found himself watching Martin watch her as she left, a little too curious about what had prompted that particular look of tender wistfulness on Martin’s face.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for forced imbibement of mind/sense-altering drugs and PoV character undergoing the equivalent of an acid trip. Further warnings for passing discussion of child abandonment/sacrifice.


	7. Chapter Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jon finally makes a move.

            A woman with white hair and a sunburned face looked across the fire at Jon with sharp blue eyes. In one hand, she held a steel flask. “Still searching, eh?” she said, with a lazy smile. “You don’t give up, do you?”

            “I do not,” Jon replied, as she held out the flask for him. He hesitated for a moment and then took it, and took a ginger sip. Even though he had tried to brace himself for it, the alcohol still burned his mouth and going down his throat. “ _This_ time—”

            “You really think it’ll be different this time?” She sounded faintly mocking, but there was an edge of real curiosity in her voice, he was certain of it.

            “This time I’m following Kimah,” he told her, with a small, secretive smile, and he enjoyed the way her face opened minutely. Surprise; perhaps even respect. “I found a set of star charts that should show me the way, and once I’m certain, I’ll go back and—” He paused. “Well.”

            She gave him a shrewd look. “Found someone at last, have you?”

            Jon couldn’t hear his own response over the crackling of the fire, and the way the horizon blazed up with sudden light as something too big to be a star and too small to be the sun rose skywards.

~

            They left Maysklaro the following morning, riding out with first light. Martin seemed recovered, and, apart from the continued strange dreams, Jon felt well enough himself. Tim wasn’t terribly personable, and the three Huntresses primarily chattered amongst themselves, but Sasha made an effort to engage Martin in conversation, and he answered her readily enough. Jon hovered on the outskirts of it, occasionally putting in a dry remark.

            A few hours before noon, they stopped at a small village, little more than a cluster of tents around an oasis. The villagers were just bedding down for the afternoon, but they welcomed the travelers, telling them to go ahead and pitch their own tents if they liked. There was plenty of clear, cool water, and they were offered some cheese and bread to go with it. Jon was making ready to pitch his own tent, when Sasha gave him a meaningful nod, and he saw that Martin was drooping a little. “I think he needs company,” Elias murmured.

            “Do you, er. Need a tentmate?” Jon offered awkwardly, and Martin turned with a smile.

            “Thanks,” he said. “I just…no one here’s been here long enough to know if a traveler came through this oasis very recently, so I still don’t know—” he broke off. “Well. Never mind. I’m just feeling a bit lonely, I suppose.”

            They lay side by side next to Sasha and Tim’s tent. The tents weren’t very thick, and they were soon chatting, mostly with Sasha. “Tim’s trying to sleep,” she explained, “so we should be quiet, but I’m not terribly sleepy.”

            The discussion turned towards the translation that Martin and Jon had been doing the previous night and from there to more general ancient history. “I really like some of the old stories,” Sasha admitted. “I mean, surprise, surprise, a scholar likes the old stories, but I’m still quite a new scholar, really.”

            “What’s your favorite?” Jon asked.

            “Oh, _The Devil’s Heart_  I think.”

            Jon paused. “That’s not a Center story, is it?”

            “There’s some argument it might be related, but it’s not one of the main five, no,” Martin agreed.

            “It was lost for several thousand years, though,” Elias put in. “So for all we know, it does belong with them.”

            “Remind me?” Jon asked, rolling onto his side.

            “Right!” Sasha said, excitedly. “The wizard of open doors had discovered a vast, bright artifact that shone like the sun. He asked many of his friends and colleagues if they knew what it was, but none of them did. So he brought together more wizards than had ever been assembled before to study it, including his two lovers, Flower and Lo. But what they didn’t know was that the artifact was actually the heart of a powerful devil, and it wanted nothing more than to consume the most precious things it could.

            “All the wizards had scrolls to protect them, but when Flower leaned over to study the artifact more closely, it reached out with invisible fingers and tipped the scroll out of his pocket. It laid its kiss on him, and he died in a day, burning from the inside.

            “Lo and the wizard of open doors were devastated at the loss of their lover, and Lo devised a torment for the artifact. He split it into two halves and tortured it by bringing it almost but not quite together, which was terribly painful for it, and it screamed silently for many days. But one day, when he was showing the others what he had done, it reached out again and made his hand slip. It was only whole for a moment, but it was long enough for it to lay its kiss on Lo, and he died like Flower, only more slowly, and the wizard of open doors wept over his blackened body in the end.

            “Miserable and alone, the wizard of open doors realized he would never be able to learn anything about the Heart, so he cast his most powerful spell of destruction on it. In the end, there was nothing left of it, but in its screaming death throes, it spawned two children, who became the gods of the wax folk and ate a quarter of a million people as soon as they were born.” She paused, sounding a little embarrassed. “Um. It’s not a _happy_ story.”

            Jon chuckled. “They rarely are.”

            “I always wondered what happened to the wizard of open doors,” Martin said, a little sadly. “I mean, both his lovers died and then he was kind of responsible for a lot of people dying.” He paused, as if waiting for someone to say something, but when Jon simply waited for him to go on, he continued. “I know some people think it’s just a fable, and I’m missing the point, but it starts hurting if I think about it too hard. That kind of sheer desolation, you know?”

            “Oh, Martin,” Sasha said softly.

            “Put your hand on his,” Elias told Jon. His voice sounded strange, as if he were trying to suppress a level of emotion Jon wasn’t certain he’d heard from him before. And what did it _mean_ , for a—a being haunting a piece of energetic jewelry to have human emotions? Particularly ones he was hiding?

            But Martin did look awfully lonely, his round face pinched and serious, and Jon was rather inclined to agree with Elias to the extent that he might need some comforting. Awkwardly, he scooted sideways and pressed his hand down onto Martin’s. Martin startled and looked up at him, and for a frozen moment, his face was in reach, and Jon could have just leaned down an inch or so and actually kissed him.

            And then Sasha said, “Oh, I think Tim’s awake, do you want to head out?” and Martin’s dark lashes came down over his eyes, and he rolled away. Jon couldn’t quite suppress a small sigh.

            “Oh, well done,” Elias said sarcastically in his ear, and with Martin right beside him, Jon couldn’t even shoot him an irritable retort.

~

            They stopped again at a lonely outcropping that Elias mentioned to Jon as the sun was setting. There was a little stream winding around the base, although the rest of the landscape was windswept and empty, and they were able to drink their fill and top up their canteens. Jon helped Martin set up the tents, while Sasha and Tim made a fire, and the three Huntresses kept watch on the surrounding area, though it was so lonely out here that Jon wondered if there could possibly be anything to guard against.

            The wind howled a soft dirge in the hollow spaces of the mesa as they finished with the last of the tents. Martin stood up from where he’d been finishing affixing the tent to the ground without looking and nearly knocked into Jon, who had paused beside him to see if he needed help. “Sorry!” he gulped, as Jon steadied him with hands that had somehow found their ways onto his shoulders.

            “This is also an opportunity, Jon,” Elias said, softly and obscurely. Before Jon could attempt to decipher this, Sasha called, “Who wants dinner?” and Martin ducked his head and flushed and shook Jon’s arms off in a halfhearted sort of way.

            Dinner was hot spiced meat over cornmeal, eaten while Tim and Sasha and Martin bantered happily, with Melanie and Basira occasionally throwing in a wry comment. It was—pleasant, even if Jon was feeling suddenly, intensely, like an outsider intruding somewhere he wasn’t wanted. Elias was quiet as well, which, from him, did not appear to be a good sign, in Jon’s experience.

            After the meal was over, Melanie produced a guitar from among the various packs she carried, tuned it, and began to play a jaunty little tune. Tim held out a hand to Sasha, who gave him a startled look for a moment before taking it. A moment later, they were dancing together around the fire, looking achingly natural in each other’s arms.

            “Come on!” Sasha cried, laughing, as Tim spun and dipped her. “Come on, grab a partner!” Melanie grinned and increased the pace of her tune slightly, and Basira got to her feet, a smile crinkling at the corner of her eyes as she offered a hand to Daisy. A moment later, both couples were spinning around the fire, seesawing their clasped hands, gasping, panting, and laughing.

            Jon hunched forward, a little embarrassed. “I don’t…I’ve never danced,” he said stiffly, as, beside him, Martin got to his feet and held out a hand.

            “I promise I won’t let you fall,” Martin said.

            “And neither will I,” Elias said, in Jon’s ear. “Jon. Please?”

            Jon swiped a bit of moisture away from one eye. He could hardly hold out against both of them. “All right.” He put out a hand and let Martin tug him to his feet. “What do I—do?”

            “I think I can give you a bit of guidance, if you let me,” Elias murmured. “As we saw during the spider fiasco, I can…tap into your mind if I’m careful.”

            Giving a slight little nod, Jon put his hand in Martin’s and tried to relax at the odd, tickling sensation of whatever Elias was doing to his head.

            “Okay,” Martin said. “Just follow my lead.” He slipped a hand behind Jon’s waist and stood facing him. “And try to keep the rhythm if you can, but it’s not a requirement.”

            It felt odd, and Jon was quite hesitant at first, especially with the strange way Elias was able to keep him from stumbling when he was sure he ought to have. Martin’s hands pushed and pulled him around as he tried to focus on getting his feet to land in ways that wouldn’t make him fall over. Something else—Elias, it must be Elias—made tiny invisible adjustments to his motions. When Jon was certain he would have lunged sideways enough he’d have fallen over, something like puppet strings caught him and bounced him back into Martin’s arms, except the puppet strings were his own muscles.

            The whole thing was rather surreal, but as he started to get into the rhythm of it, the experience narrowed and widened at the same time. Narrowed, because the music seemed to recede, and the flickering light of the fire absurdly seemed to disappear everywhere but in its golden stripes across Martin’s face and arms. Widened, because the darkness and the stillness expanded around them, until it seemed as if the three of them were dancing across a golden pool inside a vast emptiness, until they were the only three people in the universe.

            Two. Two people. Jon paused and nearly stumbled, because Martin didn’t know about Elias, and that felt—that felt _wrong_. As if he was somehow deceiving Martin about who he was. Not that Elias had said much to him, but what he had said—it had been pretty much spot on.   Jon wasn’t too dim to realize that he was starting to feel something distinctly unusual for Martin. Nor was he too dim to realize that whatever the energetic spirit was, Elias seemed to have a vested interest in helping him, and, possibly more interesting, the ability to do so.

            They took three more steps, and then Jon skidded to a halt. “I’m—I’m sorry, I need a moment,” he gritted out, trying not to look at the way the surprised hurt flickered across Martin’s countenance.

            “Oh.” Martin stopped, and somehow the light on his face went from warm to stark. “Yeah. Sure.”

            “What are you doing?” Elias hissed.

            Jon put out a hand and took Martin’s, squeezing it hard. “I’ll be right back, I promise.”

            Martin’s mouth and eyebrows drew in, announcing an emotion Jon couldn’t read, but he gave a hesitant nod. “All right,” he said.

            “I _repeat_ ,” Elias snarled, as Jon exited the ring of firelight and headed for the pathway up the side of the cliff. “By the Banded Eye, _what_ do you think you are doing?”

            “Asking you that,” Jon hissed back. He was suddenly aware that his breathing was—off. Difficult. Soughing in and out in a strange, tight way that matched with the fact his hands were trembling as he leaned back against the rough wall of rising stone. “You keep—coaching me? Trying to get me to—to—” he coughed, passing a hand through his sweaty hair. “You’re trying to get me to start a romance with Martin,” he said, accusingly. “But for some reason, you don’t want him to know about your existence. What is going on?”

            There was a harsh noise from the energetic jewelry, like a sigh made out of static. “My reasons are irrelevant,” Elias said, after a moment. “Is it such a crime to want someone I—care about to be happy?”

            “Do you mean me or Martin?” Jon snarled, and Elias was silent, so utterly silent that for a moment Jon thought he had somehow vanished, leapt away from the jewelry and out into the night sky, where the pinpricks of stars shone brightly enough, their energy distant and cold but still existent.

            “Yes.” Elias’s voice was silky-smooth, all of a sudden. “Jon, this does not concern you.”

            Jon laughed wildly. “You’re trying to get me to—what, seduce? _my_ new fr—companion whom apparently _you_ know all about, and you think that doesn’t _concern_ me?”

            “There is hardly anything forcing you to obey my suggestions.” Jon had a sudden strange feeling of being pressed up against the rock wall, pinned against it by a pair of invisible eyes. “You desire Martin,” Elias said, voice cold and ruthless. “You’ve been more than happy to take my suggestions on board because you know that I have a better idea of how to elicit a positive response than you do, and now, because you are finally getting close to the thing you want, you’re afraid. I can take you to the Center, and I can give you Martin, and you know that, and it _scares_ you.”

            “That’s—that’s not—” Jon clenched his teeth against the wave of trembling that ran up his spine.

            “Do whatever you like,” Elias said in a frozen voice, gaze still holding Jon motionless. “I have no power over you.”

            Hand shaking, stomach churning, Jon reached his hand up. “You’re right about that,” he said.

            “Wait—” Elias’s voice went high with alarm, but Jon still reached up and wrenched the piece of jewelry off his head, wincing in pain as he did so. He stood for a long moment, breathing hard, and then shoved it deep into the leather pouch at his belt. Elias could just stay by himself in darkness, if he was going to be like that.

            He spent a few minutes watching the moon rise and letting his breathing calm to a reasonable level before heading back over to the fire, where Melanie was still playing a lively tune on her guitar, and Tim and Sasha and Daisy and Basira were still dancing. Martin was seated on a log, leaning his head back; he looked up as Jon returned.

            “Can I—” Jon started, even as Martin said, “I need to—” at the same moment. Awkwardly, Jon went silent and gestured to Martin to keep speaking.

            “I need to talk to you?” Martin said, voice clear but just a little wobbly.

            “Oh, right, yeah.” Jon gave him a jerky nod. “I was just—going to ask you the same thing. Why don’t we—” he gestured in the direction of the tents.

            “Yeah,” Martin agreed. One hand reached up and began to fiddle in his curly hair.

            “Right, then.”

            They walked in silence towards the tents, had nearly reached them when Martin, a few steps behind Jon, reached out and caught his beaded sleeve.

            “Um.” Martin swallowed and cleared his throat. “So, um, the thing is. I don’t know if you—if you mind if you don’t—gods, I don’t know how to say this exactly.” He took Jon’s hand carefully, and Jon turned back towards him, his face a barely-visible dark blur in the fading, distant light of the fire. “I _really_ like you,” Martin said in a small voice. “And I think there could be, um, more than that, maybe, if we get the chance. If—if we both—but I’m not good at, um, not giving away bits of my heart, I guess you could say?” He ducked his head. “I mean, for a while, Tim and Sasha and I were a—thing. Only then someone else—” he swallowed. “Tim didn’t like him, and he didn’t like that I did, and he _really_ didn’t like it when he left to find the Center and wouldn’t take us and then I _still_ —”

            Jon nodded slowly. “You were waiting, you said. And now you think—what? You’ll find him at the Center?”

            “I don’t know,” Martin said wretchedly. “I just know I love him, and I think I’m also falling for you, and there isn’t time for hesitation with this kind of thing, because it’s so easy to lose someone, you know? I’ve stopped bothering about taking things slow, really, because you just—you never know.”

            Sliding minutely closer to Martin, Jon reached sideways and laid his hand carefully across the other’s. “I do not generally feel physical desire for other people,” he said quietly. “I don’t know if I _could_. I’d want to, I suppose, if only to understand the experience? So far, if it’s happened, it’s been rare. Which doesn’t mean I can’t—” he exhaled in a long breath. “—I really like you, too. And if you’re—unusual?—then so am I, even if it’s in a different way. You can give your heart to as many people as you want, Martin, I don’t mind.” He raised his hand in an L shape and sighted along his thumb until he’d caught the bright star from his dream on the end of it. “I want to know,” he said. “I want to know where the Center is, and I want to know what Kimah is, and I want to know _you_.”

            Martin was looking up at him from underneath his lashes, turning and running his tongue across his bottom lip, and then he said, “So, um, can I kiss you then?”

            “ _Please_ ,” Jon breathed.

            A hand on the back of his neck drew him down, and then Martin’s plump lips were against his, softly, carefully exploring the shape of his mouth. Jon put his arms around Martin’s shoulders and drew him close so they were pressed against one another, front to front. His hands brushed slowly across the soft beaded leather tunic Martin was wearing, crept up along the back of Martin’s neck—Martin made a soft, breathy noise that Jon felt right on his mouth—exploring the soft downy hairs beneath his fingers and the soft round lump of a mole next to the harder wider bumpy spheres of Martin’s spine.

            Martin’s tongue stole into Jon’s mouth, and Jon let his lips part, let Martin’s tongue carefully slide into the space between his lower lip and his teeth. Martin’s teeth scraped gently over his lower lip, and Jon’s throat made something between a breath and groan. There was still none of the desperate urgency he’d been told all his life he ought to expect, but he liked the way Martin pressed against him and made breathy little desperate noises of his own.

            “Shall I take you to bed, then?” Jon asked quietly, and Martin made a surprised squeaking, questioning noise. “Well, you did say there wasn’t time for hesitation, and I’m not exactly _good_ at this, but I’m given to understand…”

            “I have to tell you something first,” Martin blurted unhappily into Jon’s front. “I…the reason I know Sasha is because I was with the Huntresses as well for a little while after I got away from the Spiders.”

            Jon frowned. “The Huntresses? I thought they only took—”

            “Yeah,” Martin said in a rush. “They were wrong about me. _I_ was wrong about me. I—I’m…I’m strange, I guess? Happens occasionally. Rarely. Um. I fixed it, sort of, there’s herbs—and I, well, you’ve seen the scars on my chest, but. But the thing is, I couldn’t—” He swallowed and breathed through his nose, his hands clenching and unclenching in Jon’s shirt front. “I don’t have—” he gestured miserably at his lower front. “I have a cleft, still.”

            Sliding a hand gently around Martin’s cheek, Jon nodded seriously. “Well. I have almost no physical experience with any sort of, um, equipment, so…as long as you don’t mind telling me what you want me to do, there’s no problem.”

            Martin blinked, staring. “Oh,” he said, a little blankly, and then smiled hesitantly. “Um. I guess I expected this to be more of a thing. The only other person who didn’t—” he cut himself off. “Thanks.”

            “It’s no trouble.” Jon bent to kiss him again, and Martin sighed into his mouth. It was just as nice the second time. Jon threaded his hands through Martin’s dark hair, cataloguing the softness of it on his fingers and drew back just enough to nod at the tent. “Shall we, then?”

            Martin’s small smile widened. “Yeah,” he said, softly. “Yeah.”

 


	8. Chapter Seven

            Jon woke with a gasp in the middle of the night, moving from the darkness inside his eyelids to the less empty darkness inside the tent. At his front, Martin murmured sleepily and pressed his naked back to Jon’s naked chest. As Jon’s breathing started to slow back into something approaching a reasonable rhythm, he reached to the side and felt for the leather pouches he wore on his belt. He’d left Elias cut off from everything for long enough, surely.

            As he reattached the energetic jewelry to the place just below his ear, he felt two tiny little pinprick shocks, and the inside of the tent seemed to shiver with a fine, grey, granular mist. Jon shook his head with a groan and lay back down.

            The Grifwigo was burning all along the skyline; Jon could feel the heat of it on his face. “It’s beautiful,” someone said beside him. “I’ve never been far enough north to see it, though I’ve always wanted to go.”

            Jon turned to see a stranger in a dark cloth tunic with a faint pattern on it. The man was pale as the moon and nearly as luminous, and he regarded Jon out of light blue eyes beneath dusty fair hair covered by a little round cap. There were fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and his mouth. As Jon watched him, he brushed a long strand of curly hair out of his eyes and tucked it behind one ear.

            “Who are you?” Jon asked.

            “Hm, I wonder,” the man said. There was a black lake behind him; white moonlight glittered on its waves. The inferno behind Jon’s back was glaringly absent from its tenebrous depths. “Oh, please, go ahead, look.” A hand on Jon’s shoulder steered him forward, and he found himself staring down at his own reflection, his grey-streaked dark hair loosed from its usual careful binding and falling about his shoulders. The stranger was reflected on his right, and on his left, made even paler by the bleaching effect of the dark water. “If at any point you feel like returning my memories,” the man said, and his breath was hot on Jon’s ear.

            “What?” Jon asked, and he was turned again, hands steering his face down into a kiss like the one he had shared with Martin earlier, except that the instant after their lips met, the other man sank his teeth into Jon’s lower lip, and Jon yelled in pain but could not move. A feeling like shards of broken glass being pressed into his skull lanced through him.

            “My memories, _now_ , please, Jon,” said the voice in his ear.

            “I—I don’t know what—who _are_ you?”

            “Try not to be stupider than you can help,” the voice said dryly, and this time it was three voices twining around each other in a lilting chorus.

            “Elias?” Jon breathed, and he blinked, and a hand held his face tightly, a thumb stroking across his chin. “But I don’t have your—”

            He was standing, alone, in a library, staring at the fresco ringing the top of the yellow walls, a handprint pattern in red ochre interspersed with the simple spherical motif of the Banded Eye. In the center of the room stood a glass case, and inside that a piece of grey jewelry with a blinking red light winking on it. Slowly, he crossed over and opened it, lifted it out and inspected it, turning it over and over in his hands.

            There was an inscription in it, an old linguistic form difficult for him to puzzle out, but it also had a diagram showing the small round-cornered chip being pressed just to beneath an ear, so he raised it up and put it there.

            “Are you sure?” Elias asked in amusement, and the walls peeled away to reveal a black night sky with a shining diamond twinkling at the far end. “Kimah,” Elias told him, and Elias’s hand was on his, raising it up and gently spreading it into an extended _L_ shape. “ _From Center to Trine_ —”

            “— _does Kimah shine_. All right, I have your memories. How do I have your memories, exactly?” Jon asked.

            “You tell me,” Elias said, and the smile he gave Jon this time was gentler somehow, almost painful, like a crack across a face made of clay. “You’re carrying a ghost,” he said, and Jon was kneeling behind him, sliding the dark tunic off his shoulders as the dark waters of the lake lapped at Elias’s waist. The black Banded Eye stared back at him from directly between Elias’s shoulder blades.

 

            “You’re a scholar,” Jon said, slowly.

            “I have never made any secret of that fact.” There was water trickling down Elias’s forehead, from the roots of his hair and down across his shoulders, and, as Jon watched, the water carried him away with it, and he melted into a shimmering reflection in the water. “I have always been a scholar,” Elias’s reflection said.

            “No, hang on, though, wait,” Jon protested. “A scholar of the _Eye_. A person.”

            “It’s hardly my fault if it never crossed your mind that someone who spoke like a person might, in fact, _be_ a person, Jon.” He was looking down at Martin’s sleeping form, light trickling into the tent to illuminate the softness of his face in sleep and spill across his shoulders and the back of his neck, where the black web sigil was branded so clearly.

            The scene shuddered, and then Jon’s fingers were working inside Martin, and Martin was making soft, incomprehensible noises, arching back against him, slick and hot around him. “I see you managed at least that much yourself,” Elias said, and Jon looked up to find him watching them both. “Well done.”

            “Shut up,” Jon told him hoarsely, and they were standing in front of a flickering candle set on top of a woven cloth, Elias once again in that dark tunic, the little round cap clipped to his now water-darkened hair. For some reason, Jon reached out and snagged a lock of hair, wrapping it around his finger. It left dark smudges behind on his hand, not water after all.

            “A ghost, I told you,” Elias said with amusement, and Jon frowned.

            “There isn’t time for hesitation with this kind of thing, because it’s so easy to lose someone, you know?” Martin said, standing up on his toes and peering curiously at the two of them from over Jon’s shoulder.

            “He’s not really here,” Elias said, sounding a little sad, and Jon looked from the deepening lines on Elias’s face to the curious openness in Martin’s round one.

            “You’re never going to tell me what’s going on between the two of you, are you?” he asked, a little sharply.

            Elias shrugged. “Nothing, clearly,” he said.

            “Clearly,” Jon echoed irritably.

            “Well?” Martin said, meaningfully, and Jon sighed harshly and put a hand on Elias’s shoulder. He looked up, startled, and Jon kissed him.

            “What are you doing?” Streaks of dawn spread across the empty sky like dye soaking into cloth.

            “I’m kissing you,” Jon responded. “Or trying to.” Elias’s lips felt like nothing beneath his, though Jon could see him leaning up into the kiss, his hands clenching at his sides. “I would have thought that was obvious. If you want it to be realistic, you might try not talking while your mouth ought to be occupied.”

            “ _Why_ are you kissing me?” Elias asked, sounding plaintive. The water was lapping at their shoulders, and Jon could feel the coldness of it, far away, though there was no sense of moisture. He could also feel the heat of Elias’s erection pressing against his naked stomach.

            “Because I wanted to.” Jon frowned. “I’m not very good at this, I know, but I don’t think you usually have to justify it when you kiss somebody.”

            There was a pause, and then Elias gestured down at the water, almost at their necks, where the constellations were reflected with perfect clarity. “I’m still taking you to the Center, Jon, you hardly need to convince me.”

            “I’m not trying to,” Jon told him crossly, jerking his face back up so that he could kiss it some more.

            Elias chuckled. “So you want to know what desire feels like, Jon?” he asked. “ _That_ I can show you.”

            A spike of heat along with a sudden _pull_ dropped into Jon’s stomach from nowhere; the water vanished, and the tent shattered into existence around him. He was achingly hard, pressed against Martin’s back, but the pull had vanished with the dream.

            “Please do not disconnect us without first powering down the jewelry,” Elias said stiffly in his ear. “You very nearly killed me.”

            “Maybe you could try being less of an asshole,” Jon muttered, but he felt a twinge of guilt. He wanted to ask Elias how much of that dream he had actually been aware of, but he wasn’t sure he wanted the answer. Not yet.

~

            On the fourth day out of Maysklaro, Jon was half-drowsing on his horse in the bright sunlight when something swept past his ear with a humming twang.

            “Strangers!” one of the Huntresses shouted. “Make for the mesa!”

            It was almost surreal, how quickly the day had gone from sleepy ride to running for their lives again. “Why do we constantly attract Strangers?” Jon snarled rhetorically as he flattened himself against the horse’s back. Another arrow zipped past him and buried itself in the flank of Sasha’s horse, which screamed and reared up.

            “Sasha!” Martin yelled, as she swore and disappeared into a cloud of dust.

            “ _Keep riding_!” Elias said urgently, but Martin was pulling his horse up, and Jon wasn’t about to leave either him or Sasha. “Damn you,” Elias told him. “Damn you both.”

            “Shut up,” Jon gritted out. “Martin, no, stay on the horse! _Stay on the horse_!”

            Martin looked up from where he had been about to vault to the ground, where Sasha was rolling dazedly onto hands and knees. “I need to—”

            “You have a bow!” Jon yelled. “Shoot them! I’ll get her!”

            “R-Right.”

            “Fuck me,” Jon said succinctly as he slipped from the side of the horse. He was having some trouble with his senses; the moment of the fall was elongated, oozing slowly past like molasses, while there was a blank instant between his feet hitting the ground and the moment he was holding out a hand for Sasha to take.

            “Oh, no,” Sasha said, and there was another strange shuddering blankness dividing one moment from the next. Martin landed beside them, putting himself between Jon and Sasha and the approaching Strangers. When Jon turned to run for the mesa as Daisy had instructed, he found Strangers approaching from behind them as well.

            “What do we do?” Sasha asked urgently.

            “We fight,” Martin said grimly. Jon glanced to the side to see that he’d pulled an arrow out of his quiver and was slotting it onto his bow.

            “There’s too many of them!” Sasha objected, though she was pulling out her own dagger. Jon resettled his hands on his staff and shifted a little closer to Martin.

            “Sorry I couldn’t get you to the Center, Elias,” he murmured as the remaining Strangers bore down on them.

            “Don’t,” Elias said, tersely. “Jon. Don’t give up. You have to keep thinking. There must be a way out—”

            An arrow zipped by Jon’s ear, so close he felt its stinging touch, and he flinched. “We’re surrounded, the Huntresses and Tim are almost certainly dealing with _another_ group of Strangers, and, oh, have I mentioned the lack of shelter up to the horizon? What way out are you seeing exactly, Elias, I would love it if you would tell me.”

            “Don’t you _dare_ die,” Elias told him. “I did not ride with you all this way just to watch you and Martin—”

            There was a creaking noise, Jon registered, frowning; why did the ground feel suddenly unsteady beneath him? He took a hesitant step backwards, part of him distracted by the thought of dying here, bleeding out beside Martin with Elias murmuring false comfort in his ear. The blood would be very red on the pink sand. He couldn’t quite get past that. He was still trying to grapple with it when the ground fell out from under them.

            The sky overhead was blue and cloudless, an impossibly distant hemisphere marked at the edges by black puzzle pieces that came apart before his eyes. Jon was floating in darkness beneath the bright smear of blue, and then his back struck something so hard the blue and black rattled into nothingness for a long moment. The next thing he knew, there were hands pulling him upright, and he was being hurried down a round passageway whose slick dark walls shone dull orange in the flickering torchlight.

            Glancing to the side, Jon found Sasha and Martin to his left and to his right, being half-carried along on a sea of black-clad hands and bodies. He should probably be worrying, but all he could think was that at least their bodies remained whole and lacking in arrow wounds. If they were alive for now, for the next minute, that was sufficient.

            After some time, the tunnel debouched outward into a round cavern with a high, circular hole in the top, through which white light speared down in a defined cylindrical beam and illuminated a slice of black water.

            “It’s all right,” said one of their rescuers, pulling back her hood to reveal a dark-skinned woman with thin, wiry hair. “You’re safe now.”

            Sasha gave a short, sharp gasp, and Jon felt her hand on his, tugging him forward. He stumbled a few steps, and then her arm was around his waist, and Martin’s was around his back, and there was warmth and safety.

            “We’re safe,” Sasha repeated, sounding almost numb, and Jon leaned into her embrace and Martin’s. “It’s okay. We made it.”

            As Jon’s breathing began to even out in the light of the flickering torches of their rescuers and with Martin’s reassuring warmth to one side and Sasha’s to another, he realized he hadn’t heard Elias say anything since they’d fallen into the underground passageway.

            “Wait,” he said, and he wasn’t sure who he was saying that to, as he clawed up to feel for the flesh-warmed metal beneath his ear. He found it, fumbled with the power switch, bearing in mind what Elias had said the last time, and then pulled it carefully off.

            “Your jewelry?” Sasha said uncertainly, as he lifted it to the light and stared numbly.

            The lights were off, as they should be, with the power switched off as well, but there was a hairline crack running from one side to the other of the casing. “Oh, god,” Jon heard a voice saying from very far away. “Oh—oh no. Oh _no_.”


	9. Chapter Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jon dreams.

            Elias stared at him from the pool of water, dark, oily fluids leaking from his eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. He didn’t speak, and his form flickered like a ghost when Jon reached out for it, shivering with strange banding. When Jon tried to say his name, no sound came out.

            After a moment, the water drifted higher, and the candle just beneath Elias’s chin flickered. Jon wanted to tell him to hold it up, but he couldn’t do anything but stand there and watch as the water rose in fits and starts. The map to the Center lay across the glass-still water; at the point where the Center should be was the watery light of Elias’s candle, still shining up from inside the depths. Jon sat down on his knees and looked up, to see that the candle was the reflection of the bright pinprick of light that was Kimah, hanging above the horizon.

            “Jon?” The light of the candle shimmered and became the dying embers of a fire as Jon snorted in a confused breath and sat up. “Sorry, I didn’t realize you were asleep.” Martin sat down beside him; gradually, Jon managed to recognize that they were sitting at one of the fires Jude and the other travelers had built for them. They’d been eating dinner at some point, and he must have drifted off. For an instant, he couldn’t remember why his throat felt choked and sore, and then he looked down and saw the little grey piece of jewelry still tucked tight into his hand, and the heavy pain weighted down his chest again.

            “It’s fine,” Jon managed, leaning against Martin and taking comfort in his solid warmth.

            “So…do you want me to take a look at the jewelry?” Martin asked. “Uh, it’s just, well. One of my—I knew someone who knew quite a bit about older tech, and I’m not an expert, but I might be able to figure it out? If it’s not completely destroyed.”

            The sudden rising hope was almost as painful as the realization had been; Jon felt his jaw working sideways a bit. “I’d—appreciate it,” he managed. “It’s—it’s important to me. A—A keepsake.”

            “I got that.” Martin gave him a quick smile and then put a hand carefully over his. Jon shut his eyes and let his mind focus on the warmth of it. His shuddering breaths relaxed a little. “I’ll be careful.”

            “Thank you,” Jon said, although his own words sounded a little distant to his ears. “I’ll see what I can do about translating the writing on it—I’ve tried before, but it was never my primary focus.”

            Slowly, he opened his hand and produced the lopsided grey triangle, not without a twinge at the dead dullness of the unilluminated light that usually winked rapidly green-blue. “The—the writing’s on the back?” he tried. Odd, how much the scene was wavering in the firelight. He blinked rapidly. “I—I’m sorry, I can’t quite seem to—focus.”

            “May I?” Martin waited until Jon gave a jerky nod and then he took the jewelry gently and turned it over in his hands. “Give me a little while to play with it?”

            Jon gave another jerky nod. “Of course. Thanks.”

            Martin patted his hand carefully. “I’m going to go dig around in my pack and see what instruments I’ve still got with me. Will you be all right?”

            “Oh, yes. I’ll be all right, Martin, of course. Thank you.” But as Martin walked away, he couldn’t stop himself from sinking his head into his hands.

            A soft touch pulled him out of his reverie again. Sasha sat down beside him, flicking her soft, dark hair behind one ear. “Are you all right?” she asked. “I know you and Martin have been getting especially close, and I’m not him, obviously.” She gave him a soft little smile. “But we’re all scholars together, right? And, well, I’ve been a bit worried about him, and you’ve made it so much better since you arrived—so thank you for that? I’m a bit of a muddle, I’m sorry, but— _are_ you all right?”

            Jon shook his head. “Not—not exactly,” he admitted. “I thought all I was doing was searching for the Center, but it’s already turned into so much more than that. I’ve—” he snorted out a half-laugh. “—I seem to have made friends, and I’m deathly afraid that I’ve just lost one. I’m not particularly used to the idea of friends.”

            “You do seem like a bit of a loner,” Sasha agreed. “I’ve never had the knack of being on my own, personally.”

            “I’ve never had the knack of not,” Jon admitted. “People are difficult. Translations I understand. But maybe I just never met the right people until now.”

            “I was a bit like that,” Sasha said. “Like I said, I’m no good alone, but I wasn’t much of a Huntress, either. Neither was—um—” She cut herself off.

            “It’s all right, Martin told me.”

            “Oh! I didn’t realize—well. That’s good. I’m glad. Anyways, we were neither of us really much good, because we liked the companionship and everything, but we didn’t like, well, killing things, really. We quite liked the butchery afterward—we’d say a prayer together to Uvera and then we’d study how all the bits of her animals fit together—but we were never much good at the hunting part. Martin threw up a few times, even.”

            Jon wondered if the story had a point or if Sasha was just talking for the sake of talking, but it was somewhat soothing, so he didn’t stop her as she wandered off into reminiscing. After a while, Martin came back and handed Jon a sliver of grey material. “This is the part with the writing on it,” he said. “I got it off and I’m looking at the inside. It looks like some of the wires were pulled out, but I don’t think they’re damaged. I’m going to try and tease them back in. You should—honestly, you should try to get some sleep, if you can. You look pretty bad.”

            “I should—try to translate,” Jon mumbled, though the letters swam before his eyes.

            “I’ll try,” Sasha said. “Martin’s right, Jon, you should sleep. You don’t look well.”

            Jon sighed, but he had to admit he wouldn’t be much good at translating with his head aching like this. “I’ll do it in the morning,” he managed. The next thing he knew, Sasha’s hands were underneath his arms, helping him lie down, and he was slipping away into the warmth of the fire.

~

            He was curled up on his side, the sound of the wind a high grating susurrus. The weather outside was probably not quite a sandstorm, yet, but it was getting close. He hated it. For years now, the wind wailing like that had sounded like a desperate, accusatory plea. The stories of Caminayora had never bothered him when he was younger, but over the past few years, he’d found it harder and harder to dismiss them, even though he was close to grown now and should be able to dismiss them as superstition. But the idea of somebody coming back because they loved you, but _changed_ —he curled up, pulling his knees into his chest.

            Something rustled at the tent flap. The wind, he told himself, but the sound repeated twice more, almost impatiently. “Look,” he said out loud, his changing voice squeaking in a way that might have been embarrassing in front of other people. “I’ll show you.” There was no point in being absurd.

            He rolled over onto his knees and then pushed himself upright. It was irritatingly difficult to get himself to walk over to the tent flap. His knees kept locking up as if he’d been stung by a scorpion, but eventually he managed it. Stupid, to open it in this weather, but stupider to keep lying on his side, trembling, so he twitched it open onto what he knew would be a wild, empty night.

            It wasn’t.

            He stumbled backwards with a hoarse cry as the figure, strips of ragged cloth hanging from its shoulders, pushed its way into the tent, falling to its knees, arms framing its grotesquely misshapen head.

            And then it reached up and popped the head off with an obscene, squelching noise, tossing it to the ground to reveal, beneath, familiar hollow blue eyes beneath too-long fair hair. She took a deep breath, followed by a rattling cough that spewed sand across the floor.

            “Gertrude?” he croaked hoarsely, and she gave him a weary smile.

            “Elias. I’m sorry it took so long for me to come back.”

            Cold metal in his hand, and the scene crumpled. Jon blinked his eyes to find that Martin was bending over him and closing his hand around Elias’s jewelry. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

            “It’s all right. Did you—”

            “You should try it, but the lights are going on? Some of the wires were dislodged; I think I nudged everything back together okay.”

            Over his shoulder something like daylight was trickling down from far overhead, bathing him in a yellow-white radiance. “It’s…is it morning?” Jon asked, rather stupidly.

            “Oh, well. I suppose I worked a bit late, or would that be early?” Martin gave him a smile. “Go on, try it? Since you’re awake anyway?”

            Hands shaking, Jon lifted the little grey triangle and settled it in the soft, delicate hollow just beneath his ear, feeling the familiar little stinging pinprick. Elias’s voice, soft, spoke almost immediately, “That was—very unpleasant. Please thank Martin for me.”

            “Gods and demons,” Jon hissed, as he tried to breathe in and out at the same time. “Gods and _demons_. I thought—” He reached out and clutched Martin’s hand. “Thank you,” he said. “ _Thank you_.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the short chapter; there's just a natural breakpoint between here and the next thing that happens.


	10. Chapter Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our heroes reach the Center and some secrets are revealed.

            It took them another week to reach the Center. Jude Perry and the rest of the little band of travelers were only too happy to escort them, and though both Jon and Sasha worried over whether they ought to leave the others behind, Elias, murmuring in Jon’s ear, and, surprisingly, Martin speaking aloud, pointed out that assuming the others had made it away from the Strangers, the only way they were likely to be able to find them was by meeting up at the only location they all knew they were heading for. Sasha confirmed that Tim, at least, should have a basic notion of where they were going.

            The first sign that they were getting close came just after their midday siesta. Sasha made a short, sharp noise that was almost a scream. “What is it?” Martin asked immediately, and Jon’s gaze followed her shaking finger over to the sandy ridge. Standing on it, tail lashing slightly, its wide eyes tracking their every movement, was a wildcat, in every respects a perfectly normal animal, except that it was glittering so brightly iridescent it was almost impossible to look directly at it.

            “Oh gods,” Martin said, and Elias’s soft voice in Jon’s ear whispered, “So it’s true.”

            “It’s not possible,” Jon heard himself saying stiffly. “It can’t be. It’s a myth.” But he knew that he didn’t mean it.

            Martin’s hand slipped into his. “Images of cats,” he said, with a laugh. “Jon, look, you were right—it’s _glowing_. Isn’t it beautiful?”

            The cat paused for a moment, apparently looking down at them. Then, with a single lash of its tail, it turned and bounded away down the other side of the ridge. “Gorgeous,” Sasha said in a voice that was shaking only a little.

            They set up camp a few hours later, close to where Elias told Jon he thought the Center was. Although Jude and the others had been very helpful, Jon still felt uneasy about anyone who was not a scholar of the Eye accompanying him to the Center. Ungrateful as it made him feel, he waited until dawn the next morning, when everyone else was sleeping, had Elias wake him, and then slipped out of the camp. Martin and Sasha were waiting for him, of course.

            “I thought you might try something like this,” Martin said, and Sasha put in, “It’s—well, it’s our holy place, isn’t it? Not theirs.”

            They saw another of the glowing cats as they made their way across the pink sand of the desert. They were still quite a distance away from the spot that Elias had suggested as the likeliest location when Sasha, squinting, shaded her eyes and said, in a rather puzzled voice, “What’s that? Is that a forest?”

            Jon squinted against the brightness of the rising sun and followed her pointing finger. The dark, spiky outline against the sky didn’t quite look like a forest, but he wasn’t certain what else it might be.

            As they drew nearer, it became increasingly evident that it was not a forest. “By the Eye,” Martin said in a hushed voice, staring up at the jagged, thirty-foot tall spikes made of a matte black rock from which smaller spikes protruded at apparently random angles.

            “It’s like that old story,” Sasha put in eagerly. “I found it in the library once, half-translated? It’s about a boy who fights his way through a landscape of thorns to save something very precious to him. I didn’t have time to finish translating it myself, and then I think they lost it? But I loved the way the words were put together.”

            “The message is a problem,” Jon murmured to himself. He reached sideways for Martin’s hand and found that Sasha had taken the other. The three of them looked at one another. “They were right, you know,” Jon said with a frown. “The message _is_ a problem—how do you understand what people from thousands of years ago were trying to tell you? They didn’t speak our language, and we don’t speak theirs. We don’t even know what has changed in the world since then.”

            “Like your time, I am still dangerous,” Sasha said. “Do you think it was the Center they meant? Or something else?”

            Martin squeezed Jon’s hand tight. “Let’s find out,” he said.

            It grew hotter as they entered, ducking around the spikes, squeezing between them. There was more of the black material the thorny spikes had been made of embedded in the ground, and it was ferociously, unpleasantly hot, almost preternaturally so. Jon could feel the heat through the soles of his soft shoes.

            “I can’t help feeling like we’re being tested,” Sasha said quietly.

            “This is fascinating,” Elias whispered in Jon’s ear, his voice laden with a ravenous desire.

            Once they had passed through the wall of spikes, the oppressive heat grew a little less so. “Look.” Elias sent a bright, strange shock of pain through Jon, something Jon hadn’t even known he could do. Jon looked up and saw a vast ring of stone slabs facing outwards around the crumbling remains of what appeared to have been a rather large building, but was now an open shell, cracked to expose its tender belly to the elements.

            As they drew closer, he saw that there were words on the slabs, words close-packed and herded into three different paragraphs.

            “By the _Eye_!” Martin leapt forward. “Look, _look_ , it’s three different languages! I think it’s saying the same thing in each!”

            Sasha followed him with a squeal of excitement and began to run her hands across the letters. “You’re right,” she said, her voice going up and up with eagerness. “You’re right, you’re _right_!”

            Jon’s knees felt abruptly weak, and he had to stand still for a moment to prevent himself from actually sitting down on the ground with a thump. “If this is what we find before we even enter, what treasures await us inside?” Elias said, in a hushed voice, giving voice to the feeling that Jon couldn’t, because he couldn’t even make his mouth move.

            It took him several minutes to recover, long enough that Martin noticed, hurrying back and putting an arm underneath his elbow. “Are you all right?” he asked solicitously.

            “Fine,” Jon managed hoarsely. “Before we continue, we should take a rubbing of whatever we can, just—just in case.”

            “Yes,” Martin agreed. “Right, yes, of course.”

            With the three of them working together, it didn’t take terribly long, although they had to patch some of the words together from different slabs—thankfully their ancestors had ensured a great deal of redundancy—where weather damage had occurred. Jon had to stop several times just to run his hands across the words, these words that had survived countless generations to be delivered to them only now. “Thank you,” he breathed out, a prayer directed nominally towards the unwavering Eye, but also in some sense a wider expression of gratitude to some inchoate idea he wasn’t even sure he grasped.           

            Once they had finished with the slabs, they took each other’s hands again and entered the building proper. A looming banded eye stared down from the wall, black-on-yellow. There were webs everywhere, lying in layers across filing cabinets and screens. Some of them were the characteristic taut round webs Jon was used to, but others were like half-formed scribbles, anchored in the wrong places and malformed all across them. It made Jon stop for a half-moment, nervous and confused.

            “What’s wrong?” Elias murmured.

            “The webs,” Jon said. “There’s something wrong with the spiders. Or there has been.” The webs he judged to be more recent seemed less wobbly, more precise, but there was still something strange about them—a slight inconsistency in the sizes, perhaps, or something else he couldn’t quite put his finger on.           

            “Well, she did go insane,” Sasha said reasonably, and, of course, she was right, but there was still something unsettling and almost poignant about the sight of those oddly warped webs, something that made Jon want to follow them, slipping between tables and overturned chairs, trying to discern some kind of pattern in the haphazard loops of silk.

            He almost fell over the corpse.

            Jon stared numbly at the body that lay canted across the rift in the floor. In the dry, crisp heat of the desert, it had not really rotted, and the curly hair pulled back around the pinched, leathery countenance was a white-blond that might simply be bleached from the sun. “What—” he started, through a throat that was constricted, possibly by dust.

            “Ah,” Elias’s calm voice said. “I see you’ve found my predecessor.”

            Jon’s stomach lurched, and the world seemed to shiver in front of his eyes. “What?” he asked quietly.           

            “Much as I commend your curiosity,” Elias said dryly. “I don’t think now is the time for delays.”

            “Oh, god,” Martin said from behind him, and Jon heard Elias give a soft sigh, a noise that sounded almost resigned. “Oh, god. Oh, no. _No_.” He pushed past Jon in a moment and was kneeling on the ground by Elias’s—by the corpse, one hand flying to his mouth to cover a loud, hiccupping sob. “Elias,” he whispered. “Oh, please. Oh, no.”

            Sasha hurried across the room towards them. “Oh,” she said softly. “Oh, I—” She put a hand on Martin’s shoulder. “Martin.”

            Jon stood poleaxed with confusion. “What?” he said. “All right, no, I’m afraid we’re going to _have_ to have a delay. Elias?”

            “He was a scholar—” Martin scrubbed his hand over his eyes, the tears falling freely, his voice broken up. “He…he…was my…”

            “I believe Jon was speaking to me,” Elias said loudly, for the first time loud enough that his voice wouldn’t be confined just to Jon’s ear, and Martin whipped around, his face dull, eyes wide and already red with tears.

            “What,” he said. “ _What_.”

            “I am a version of the consciousness of Elias Bouchard, which he transferred to a…piece of energetic jewelry of some sort. Ancient technology. We were—he was— _I_ was playing with it before I left for the Center. I suppose I am the _only_ version of his consciousness now.”

            “And you—you neither of you— _told_ me?” Jon flinched at the tone in Martin’s voice.

            “I didn’t know,” he protested, horrified heat rising to the back of his neck as he remembered the dream he’d had about Martin the very first night. It hadn’t been his dream at all, had it? Why hadn’t that occurred to him until now? _All_ those dreams—and he hadn’t questioned, hadn’t asked, and _Martin_ — “I—I didn’t—not for sure—”

            “You didn’t know _for sure_? What have you been saying to him, Elias? Why didn’t you _tell_ me?”

            “There isn’t time for sentiment, Martin,” Elias said, the words cracking like whips.

            “But—” Martin gave both of them a soft, wounded look. “How could you?” he asked.

            Jon’s fingers played uneasily over Elias’s smooth casing. “I—I couldn’t know,” he protested again, softer this time. “I mean, you never said anything. Either of you.”

            “You could have told me he was—you could have—” Martin said angrily. “Didn’t you trust me? Elias, you— _why_?”

            “We really don’t have time for this,” Elias said. “Every minute you both spend here puts you in greater danger.”

            “There’s nothing here,” Martin snarled. “It’s all just—it’s just a fake. Like both of _you_.”

            “Someone killed me,” Elias pointed out. “And I have no idea who it was. So _perhaps_ we could have this discussion later.”

            “No! No, we can’t, you can’t just—I _waited_ for you!” Martin’s voice was trembling. “I would have waited—you said you’d come back!”

            “Yes, well, as it turns out, I _died_ ,” Elias snipped in response. “Difficult to return when you’re dead.”

            “You made it back and _you didn’t tell me_!”

            “You’re making too much of this, Martin.”

            “We were—we were—”

            “There was a dalliance. Of convenience.”

            Martin’s face went white, his lips thinning. “Right,” he said faintly. “Right. Of course. I’ll just—um. I’ll just. Jon. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I’m not—I’m sorry.”

            “Martin—” Jon tried, and then subsided at the sharp pain Elias sent rocking through him. Martin took a long, deep, shuddering breath, then turned on his heel and walked out. Sasha looked back and forth between his retreating back and Jon, then frowned and followed after, calling out his name. “What did you do that for,” Jon gritted as soon as Martin was out of earshot, and Elias had relaxed the drilling pain in his skull.

            “He was going to be a liability,” Elias said coolly. “And you wanted them to be safe too, didn’t you?”

            “Then—were you really—tell me the _truth_ , Elias.”

            There was a long beat of silence. “We have other things to worry about right now, Jon.”

            “ _Elias_. If you don’t, I swear I’m walking out of here.”

            “You wouldn’t.”

            Jon’s stomach roiled at the thought of leaving without finding what he’d come here to find, but he stood firm. “Do you want to chance it?”

            “Fine. Start looking and I’ll tell you.” Shivering with relief, Jon edged uneasily around Elias’s corpse and began to sift through the rubble to see if he could find anything else. “I met Martin on my first attempt to reach the Center,” Elias said. “It was abortive; the map I’d placed my faith in turned out to be a cheap fraud. At first I thought Martin was just an idiot, but when we were ambushed by a group of Strangers, he—he played the fool so effectively that they made the error of leaving him untied because they believed he was no threat. He killed every one of them and saved me, Tim, and Sasha. Martin—has a hidden core of steel, he is unflinchingly loyal, and he is quite intelligent, although he doesn’t believe it himself. The two of us—yes, I cared—I _care_ about him. All right?”

            “Gods, and so do I,” groaned Jon, slipping on the gravel underfoot and going down on one knee. Something caught at the side of his vision, glimmering in the dim light. “And you,” he admitted grudgingly.

            “Why, Jon, I’m flattered.”

            “Shut up.” It was a book, lying beneath a thick, sharp triangle of broken glass, glowing with an eerie blue light. Gingerly, Jon lifted up the glass and set it down to the side; the glow diminished. A moment later, an odd, metallic tang filled his mouth.

            “Jon,” Elias said, and his voice was deadly serious, wiped of any of his usual lazy sarcasm. “The release of energy is a form of risk.”

            Jon, who had been reaching for the book, paused. “You think it means—”

            “I think we don’t know what was causing that glow,” Elias said slowly. “I think you had better take care.”

            “Right. All right.” He reached for the book, and something shifted in the floor below. “Oh, fires—”

            He barely had time to clap his hand over Elias, determined not to have a repeat of the earlier incident, when he was falling again, wood and debris accompanying him on all sides. The world jumbled in front of his eyes, and when it straightened out again, Elias was saying his name, over and over again.

            “Yes, it’s fine, I’m fine,” Jon replied, although pain was shooting through his lower back, and the back of his neck was pressed against something uncomfortably warm. He sat up with a groan and looked around, a little dizzily, to see that he’d been lying on the book. Why was _it_ warm? _The release of energy is a form of risk._

            With a slight chill running down his spine, he got shakily to his feet and looked around. He was in a square room with an energetic screen and writing board at one end. The dust-covered walls around him were crumbling with age and smeared with some kind of viscous, oily liquid in patches, but the Banded Eye emblem still stood out clearly against the concrete. He bent to pick up the book, felt the warmth on his fingers, and let it lie, for now. He could come back to it.

            “Try the screen?” Elias suggested, his voice burning with its usual hunger now that Jon was apparently unharmed.

            “Yeah,” Jon said hoarsely. He tried to tread lightly on the sacred ground, but his feet left trails in the thick dust. When he got closer, he realized that although the same layer of thick dust lay across everything, the screen and board itself looked to be of a different era than the energetic eyes he could see ringing the top of the room. Most of the eyes were dead, but one of them still rotated jerkily, trying to follow Jon’s progress with a whining noise.

            The screen, though—it was the same gunmetal grey as Elias’s housing, with the same kind of arrangement of lights at its base, one of which still blinked unsteadily. Jon swept a hand across the board, and the whole thing lit up, the screen turning a darker black and then displaying a shaky green image of the Banded Eye with bright green script beneath that Jon squinted at, in an attempt to translate.

            “Plug me into it,” Elias told him.

            “Are you sure about that?” Jon asked.

            “Eye’s sake, Jon, why is that even a question?”

            Jon didn’t bother to answer; he sighed harshly, reached up, and turned off the jewelry. “Idiot,” he told the now-quiescent Elias, but he had hardly a leg to stand on, given that he would have said the same thing in Elias’s place.

            There was a spot at the base of the screen that looked as if it would fit the two-socket plug in the back of the jewelry; Jon hesitated for one moment longer, and then careful slid it into place. There was a soft click, and one of Elias’s lights flashed. A moment later, the image on the screen shivered and was replaced by the writing on the six panels they had seen outside, repeated over and over again.

            “Oh,” said Elias’s voice, somehow amplified by the round scatter of holes in the side of the screen. “ _Oh_. I can—I can see it—I can—”

            The screen changed again, and now Jon was looking at an older man with greying hair receding from his forehead, stooped over the same desk he, Jon, was now standing behind. The man looked up with hollow eyes, pressing his fingers into his temples. When he spoke, it was in Elias’s voice, the motions of his mouth not quite matching with the words Jon was hearing; presumably Elias was translating after recovering enough information to do so with facility.

            “Last report of Jurgen Leitner, main maker at the recovered old science facility, in historical times called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.” He gave a long sigh. “It is shortly to be abandoned for a second time. We have failed.”

            A dark-haired young man behind him moved into frame and handed him a grey triangle, identical to the jewelry that housed Elias, except that it did not have the hairline crack running across it. “Scholar Leitner, your safety.”

            “Thank you, Gerard.” Leitner half-turned to receive the object, tucked it beneath the base of his skull, and continued speaking. “They have left us here to die. We tried to use the stories that were left to us by our ancestors, but we have failed. The creature we awoke when we disturbed this site was not to be controlled. In our rashness and folly, we thought to harness the energy like our grandfathers, but we could not. The burning sickness spread and consumed us one by one. Now Mordechai so fears what we have become that he and Agnes have fled and walled us away from the rest of the world with a vast fiery chasm.”

            “The Grifwigo,” Jon said in a hushed, quavering voice. The recording shimmered to a halt as Elias answered.

            “It appears to be of human origin, yes.”

            “And this burning sickness? This…this creature they awoke? Here?”

            “The recording is fragmentary,” Elias told him. “I am attempting to find all the information, but I am still, frankly, unused to scholarly pursuits from this frame of reference. It may take some time. But—Jon—this truly is—there is—there is so _much_. So much history, so much scholarship, so much _information_.” He sounded almost awed, a little overwhelmed.

            There was something wet on Jon’s cheek, and he put up a hand to find that a tear was rolling down over it. Martin should be here, he thought, a little wildly. He and Elias shouldn’t have sent him away; they should have brought the other scholars, too. This was too big a discovery for them alone.

            And then there was a cracking noise above him, dust showering down around him. He realized he ought to be ducking or putting up his hands to shield his head just in time for Martin to stumble into an unsteady landing beside him, and by then it was obviously too late. “Martin, what are you—”

            “They’re wax folk, Jon!” Martin gasped. “I don’t know if Sasha’s—Jude Perry and the others. They’re _wax folk_!”

            “What? They can’t be.” Jon stared at him in stupefied horror. “What on earth are you talking about?”

            “We have to get out of here, they wanted to follow us to the Center, and—”

            “And you’ve led us right to it, quite helpfully,” said a voice from above.

            “Oh, shit,” Martin said. “Oh no. I didn’t—” He stumbled forward.

            Jude was looking down at them through the hole in the ceiling. Her wide black sleeves were rolled back to reveal the characteristic swollen, pouched flesh of the wax folk around her wrists. “Go on in,” she said to someone behind her, and then a whole group of the travelers was swarming down into the hole as Jon stood shocked and uncomprehending.

            “Jon,” Martin said urgently. “Jon, we have to—” _Run_ , Jon’s mind supplied. _Or fight. Pick one. Now._ It almost sounded like Elias’s voice, but Elias wasn’t—oh, god. Jon half-turned back towards the screen, but before he could even take a step, something heavy crashed into his skull, and the world broke into black sharp blankness.

 


	11. Chapter Ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific warnings at the end

            “Jon. Can you hear me? _Jon_.”

            “Mmmngghh.” Someone groaned in his ear. Pain lanced through his head. “Mmguhwha?” Why did someone keep making incomprehensible noises, and why couldn’t Jon hear himself asking Martin what was wrong?

            “I think I can get my hands free if I try. I might have to dislocate my thumb, but I’ve done that before.”

            A blurry image swam into view in front of Jon’s eyes, a dark smear over yellow, which gradually resolved itself into Martin’s hair over Martin’s brightly-dyed leather tunic.

            “Mmm?” It _was_ Jon’s mouth groaning, the words from his mind not making it out of his lips unscathed. There was something sticky above one of his eyes.

            Slowly, things swam into focus, as did the fact that his hands were trapped in metal behind his back. “Martin?” he managed, finally, blinked. There was an acrid scent rising in his nostrils. “Is that smoke?”

            “I think so,” Martin said miserably. “Fires, Jon, I’m sorry, I really cocked this one up.”

            Jon shook his head, slowly. “They’d have found it anyway, Sasha knew where we were going.”

            Somewhere, something began to scream, an undulating, unending death wail that went on and on.

            “Right, I’m getting my hands out.” Martin flinched slightly, and there was a soft popping noise. He gasped and swore, trembling and bending forward.

            “Wait,” Jon said hoarsely, far too late. “Martin—”

            “I’m all right,” Martin said, though his voice was high with pain. “Just give me a minute.”

            A set of yellow lights started blinking insistently above his head, and the smell of smoke was intensifying. Jon shook his head, trying to clear it, but it was so difficult. The floor didn’t seem to be quite steady. The next moment, Martin was standing beside him, and he was blinking, because his eyes were stinging. The screaming had gotten, if possible, louder.

            “Oh, shit,” Martin said, his hands on Jon’s wrist. “Yours are tighter, or maybe your hands are bigger. Um. Okay, that’s fine. We can make this work.”

            “Martin, just get out of here,” Jon told him. “Eye’s sake, there’s no sense us both staying.”

            “Shut up, you know I don’t leave people.” Martin gave him a quick smile.

            “I don’t think cutting off both my hands is going to be very helpful— _ow_.” Martin was now trying to work the handcuffs over his wrists. “That’s really not going to do it, Martin,” Jon snapped, the pain doing what the fear and Martin’s voice hadn’t and bringing him to full consciousness.

            “Well, what do you suggest then?”

            There was a red glow at the end of the corridor; mixed in with the shrieking wail was a low ripple of laughter.

            “There should be a way to undo the locking mechanism,” Jon said, as it was becoming very clear Martin was going to stay here with him no matter what he said. “I’ve never done it myself, but I’ve read about it. If you take a thin piece of metal and fiddle around with it—”

            “Right,” Martin said. “Right. Yeah. I’ll just—I’ll be back in a minute.”

            Jon leaned his head back against the wall, breathing and trying not to think too hard, listening to the piercing shrieks, and the sound of a slowly growing crackling noise that he hoped he was only imagining. If he thought too hard about what was happening, he would curl into a ball and never get up again, and then he and Martin would both die, and the Center would—

            The Center would burn.

            The thought dragged Jon back upright with a gasp, barely able to stop himself from jerking the chains right out of Martin’s hands.

            “I’ve almost got you,” Martin told him. “It’s okay.” There was a clicking sound, and the metal fell away from Jon’s hands. “There we go.” He put out a hand, Jon took it, and they balanced against one another’s weight until Martin was able to pull Jon to his feet.

            “What now?” Jon asked dizzily. It was warmer down here now, an unnatural warmth in these darkened tunnels the sun could not touch. “We can’t just leave, we can’t—”

            “Jon. Martin. Can you hear me?” Elias’s voice, floating down from the walls.

            Martin flinched minutely, and Jon tried to ignore the guilt that welled up in him in response, because there was no time for it. “Yes,” he said, at least taking the burden off of Martin to answer.

            “There is a fire suppression system, but several of the wires have been damaged, and it will have to be activated manually, which means you will have to do it.”

            “All right,” Jon said. “Tell us where to go.”

            “Left along the corridor and watch out for wax folk,” Elias told him shortly. “The eyes I have access to are sporadic, but I know they have not all left the facility.”

            The smoke grew thicker, the heat grew stronger, and the taste of metal more and more ubiquitous in Jon’s mouth as he and Martin hurried down the corridor. They met their first wax person three turns down the corridor, following Elias’s instructions. He was standing with his face upraised and arms outstretched.

            Jon paused, trying to make up his mind what to do, but, before he could do anything, Martin launched himself forward, tackling the wax man and bearing him to the floor. “Mar—” Jon coughed, and then there was a sickening thump, a clatter, and another movement, and Martin pushed himself back up. The wax man didn’t rise, and, after a moment, Jon realized there was a red pool sluggishly forming around him, and Martin was holding a large, wicked-looking knife he hadn’t had before. “By the Eye,” Jon said limply.

            “I was a Hunter,” Martin said coolly. “Come on, Jon, we don’t have a lot of time.”

            “Wait,” Elias said as they stepped over the body towards the door. “There’s fire through there, and—something else. I’m still sifting through the database trying to understand what it is, but you’ll want to go very quickly. Don’t stop, no matter what. Do you understand?”

            “Yes, Elias,” Jon replied, putting a hand on Martin’s shoulder. “Right. Okay. Ready?”

            They put their hands on the door, and Jon immediately felt the heat through his palms. One more quick breath, one more set of exchanged glances, and they pushed. The door opened, and the two of them stumbled inside.

            Inside was a roaring inferno. There was a central pathway devoid of flames, a thin strip of damp concrete, but to either side were what looked to have been barrels, consumed by fire. The blast of heat nearly made Jon stagger backwards, but somehow he kept his feet. “Run,” he choked. “ _Run_.”

            Stride after stride, through a nightmare of roaring flames and heat—“Keep your head down!”—an instruction that seemed to come out of nowhere. They reached the other side and tumbled out, slamming the door behind them; Jon’s memory was nothing but a smear of pain and bright red light. The distance they’d gone couldn’t have been more than a few feet, but Jon still stumbled three steps along the corridor, trembling and feeling faint, then threw up. He heard the sound of Martin retching behind him, as well.

            The floor felt as if it was buckling underneath his feet, the corridor swaying slightly. Bright sparkles of light invaded Jon’s vision, and he blinked, coughing and trembling, but the sparkles didn’t vanish. “Martin?” he said weakly. “Elias?”

            There was something he needed to do, Jon remembered. He frowned, glancing sideways along the corridor to where there was a crumpled pile of yellow leather, a smear of dark hair along the top. Martin. Martin? He took a weak step in that direction, then paused. There was pain in his chest, a tight, clenching pain like a gripping fist, tensing and loosening in an almost periodic rhythm.

            “Jon, you have to get to the extinguishers. _Jon_.” Elias’s voice penetrating from somewhere very far away. “The wax folk are coming after you.”

            He couldn’t leave Martin. Jon put one hand on the containers by the wall to steady himself and gasped with pain again, because his hand—his hand was burning. He looked to the side and there was no sign of anything wrong with it, but he could feel the bright, sharp pain of it, all-consuming and terrible.

            The yellow bundle on the floor moved slowly, jerkily, and Martin looked up, blinking as if he were dazzled by some bright light. Jon forced himself to move again and put out his non-burning hand for Martin to take. It was difficult to get him upright, and Jon had to ignore the way his thoughts kept trying to skitter away, and the bone-deep exhaustion that kept trying to pull him down on the floor to sleep beside Martin, but somehow, the two of them managed it. Martin staggered up, half-collapsing against the containers along the wall with Jon, and the two of them began to make their way slowly along the corridor.

            They were three-quarters of the way to another heavy, metal door when he heard the noise of the wax folk behind them, the slap of their feet against the concrete and their shouts, though if there were words in the noise, he could not distinguish them. It was like the crackling of the flames again, Jon thought, and when he glanced back, he seemed to see the crowd of people glowing with an unearthly light, sending those strange white sparkles through his vision again.

            The door at the end of the corridor opened at a touch, and Jon stumbled through, half-dragging Martin with him. When he turned wearily to push it shut behind them, he saw that the inside of it was yellow and marked with a huge Banded Eye that seemed to stare directly through him. “Almost there,” Elias’s voice said, calm and soothing. “You’re doing well, both of you, but I don’t believe the door will hold Jude and the others for long.”

            “Then tell us what to do,” rasped Martin, his voice hoarse and desperate, the first thing he’d said to Elias since he’d fallen through the ceiling.

            “There should be a set of levers at the far end of the room,” Elias said calmly. “You’ll have to pull them down. Quickly, please.”

            “Easy for you to say,” Jon mumbled. The undulations of the floor beneath his feet had, if anything, gotten worse. Still, it wasn’t a very wide room. Leaning against Martin, he managed the final few steps with a minimum of difficulty.

            There was a set of rusted levers along the wall with script above them. It seemed to dance in front of Jon’s eyes, and even if it hadn’t, he doubted he’d have been able to read it. He reached for the first lever, tried to pull it down, and there was a creaking, groaning noise. It protested, but after a moment it began to slide into place. Beside him, Martin was pushing down on the next one over.

            After a moment, there was a _click_ , and then an insistent hissing. White gas was seeping in from beneath the door. From beyond it, there was a sudden sound of gasping and coughing. “Very good,” Elias told him, sounding oddly gentle. “Martin, please download me back onto the jewelry, and we’ll be going. The sooner the better, I think. Jon, get up.”

            “Oh,” said Jon. At some point, he’d slumped forward and was sliding slowly down the wall. “Right,” he managed. Then “Martin?” vaguely.

            “Yeah, I…yeah.”

            Jon’s head was hurting so hard it was almost blinding him. Martin was a large smeary shadow who moved forward and did something. “Walk,” Elias told them. “The door at the far end. There should be a staircase upwards.”

            There was, grey and narrow, with rusting, fragile-looking steps. It seemed to wind upwards forever, fading off into a hazy distance. Jon’s stomach roiled, and his hand burned, and his head hurt, but somehow he put a foot on one step and then another.           

            Somewhere halfway to the top, he had to stop to throw up again, and his knees buckled under him. He was seated on cold metal with his head in his hands, making a quiet whimpering, moaning noise that was nevertheless too loud for his own ears.

            “It’s okay, Jon, it’s okay.” Martin’s arms crossed over Jon’s chest, Martin’s voice a soft little caress in his ear. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

            Jon leaned his head sideways against the cool wall and wished his head would stop hurting so much. Pain was building in his gut, as well, a weird insistent ache, joining the nausea and the rank taste of metal in his mouth on the list of reasons that today was definitely the worst one he’d ever had—but also, he thought vaguely, the best one as well.

            “We found it,” he heard someone saying. “We found the Center.”

            He didn’t realize he’d gotten up again until he felt hot, dry wind on his face, and he and Martin stumbled outside into the desert. The air was clearer, suddenly, and Jon drew in a long, deep breath, only to start coughing helplessly, sharp pain lancing through his lungs. Beside him, Martin was coughing as well.

            “Fires,” choked Jon, pressing a hand to his stomach. “I need—I need water or—”

            “Yeah,” Martin agreed faintly. “Give me your hand. We’ll just—we’ll get through the spikes and then we’ll be all right.”

            “What—what about Sasha?”

            “Shit,” Martin said. “I didn’t—I don’t. I don’t know.”

            “You two are in no condition to go hunting her,” Elias said sharply. “You can find her once you’ve had a rest, preferably a long one. And I require some processing time, in any case, before I’m going to be of use.”

            There was some reason he ought to protest, Jon thought, but it hurt so _much_. His head, his stomach—he choked out something that might have been a response, though he was distinctly unsure as to whether it was a coherent one.

            The sun was setting, or perhaps rising, turning the landscape of thorns into a surreal forest of black-striped shadows. Another one of the glowing cats appeared as they walked, and twined around Jon’s legs, purring loudly, its fur puffed out like a porcupine. “Jon. Keep going,” Elias told him; he hadn’t realized he’d stopped. It was odd, how his thoughts kept slipping away.

            The striped dark shadows disappeared, and above them a bright white moon rose. So it had been sunset. The cat followed, a ball of eerie fulmination, for a long time, meowing almost companionably. Eventually, its trajectory peeled away from theirs. Jon wondered vaguely where they were going and for how much longer they could. The pain in his gut was nearly unbearable now.

            “I think—I need to stop,” Martin said, sounding faint. “I need—I need rest.”

            “Yeah,” Jon agreed wearily. There was a mesa rising beside them; he wasn’t sure when they’d reached it. Or perhaps it had simply risen from the ground in silence, a wall of shadow biding its time, waiting for—waiting for what? He was tired, and his head was throbbing, and he was cold. He was so cold. “We should stay close,” he managed. “For warmth.”

            “In a minute,” Martin mumbled. “I need to—um—” he flinched, his hand pressed across the lower part of his stomach.

            Jon made a low noise of painful, faintly embarrassed agreement, and they parted for a few minutes, the darkness and cold closing about him like a steel trap.

            Excretion seemed to help with the pain, if only marginally, and when he stumbled back to find Martin again, Martin made a soft, needy noise and pulled Jon against him. “Jon,” he whispered, and Jon tried to say something as well, but it came out as a pitiful whimper. He buried his face in Martin’s shoulder, and it was just warm enough like that, in Martin’s embrace, for him to slip away from the pain, and it was only as he was teetering on the dizzy edge of blackness that the bright-burning thought flamed up again, _We found the Center. We found it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for a slew of rather unpleasant symptoms including vomiting and diarrhea, though it's not terribly explicit, as well as mental confusion on the part of the PoV character.
> 
> Also thanks to Rastaban for helping me brainstorm this chapter.


	12. Chapter Eleven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jon and Martin meet a god. Maybe?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somewhat spoilery warnings at the end of the chapter.

            “Very pious acts are not written here.” Jon looked around to find who had spoken and discovered that it was Elias, standing up to his knees in the lake. It wasn’t dark any longer, but a peculiar, glimmering yellow. “That was the very first thing I ever learned about the Center, you know.”

            Jon took a step toward him, then another, but it was no good: the distance between them did not diminish. “It’s one of the more famous quotes,” he agreed with a shrug.

            “Yes,” Elias said, almost meditatively, and he dipped a hand into the lake, scooping up a little of the water in his cupped palm and drinking from it. Jon saw it going down his throat, so suddenly, nakedly brilliant that it shone right through the pale skin. “Piety was more or less important to the community in which I was raised,” he explained. “Although there was something of a perpetual disagreement as to what constituted piety.”

            There was a sound of rasping stone as the black thorns from the Center began to grow around the lake. “I’ve only ever understood the kind of piety a scholar knows,” Elias continued. The tips of his fingers were glittering iridescently, and patches of bright light shone through his dark tunic in random places. “I imagine you know what I’m talking about, Jon?”

            “Yes,” Jon agreed, his eyes tracing the fluttering lines of Elias’s tunic and his curly hair. “The—I wanted to know. I wanted to find the knowledge. And we did.”

            “We did,” Elias agreed. He turned; in one hand was an apple, and he held it out to Jon. “Have a taste?”

            Jon stretched out towards him. The tips of his fingers brushed over the slick flesh of the fruit, and then he paused. “Someone’s crying,” he said, quietly. The sound of soft sobbing filled the air, and Elias looked up, startled, the apple falling from his hand. “It’s—”           

            Rubbing his eyes, Jon sat up sleepily. The line of pink along the horizon suggested a bright day dawning, but the soft noise of sobbing had not faded when the rest of the dream did. “Is that—”

            “It’s Martin,” Elias confirmed. “Jon, I—”

            “You need to talk,” Jon said. “All of us need to—” He expelled a harsh breath, getting to his feet slowly. The dizziness and nausea of the day before seemed to have mostly receded, at least, though he still felt rather wobbly on his feet.

            He found Martin sitting with his face buried in his knees, back against the steeply rising slope of the nearby mesa. “Are you all right?” Jon asked, feeling stiff and strange. There was so much laid between them, now; everything he hadn’t had time to worry about while they were desperately trying to save the Center now loomed heavily.

            Martin looked up. “Turn him off,” he said hoarsely. “Jon. Please. _Please_.”

            Jon raised a hand, hesitated for half an instant, and then did as Martin asked, before Elias could sound an objection if he had one. “I don’t particularly like doing that,” he said, voice hoarse and hollow.

            “Yeah, well, he can fucking deal.” Martin took a deep, sobbing breath, and pushed himself upright, back against the rock. “He doesn’t get to know yet. He kept secrets, so—so can I.” He’d taken off his leggings, Jon realized. His legs were bare, and there was something dark trickling down his inner thighs, something that glittered red in the first rays of dawn.

            “ _Martin_ ,” Jon said, taking a quick step forward. “What—”

            Martin’s mouth was shaking a little. “I—I—” he said, and his hands hovered over his stomach. “I wasn’t going to tell you,” he said, a little hopelessly. “I wasn’t going to tell _anyone_. At first, I wanted Elias to know first, and then—I felt it kick for the first time three nights ago, and—and—” he choked, pressed his hands to his eyes. “Fuck,” he said, succinctly. “ _Fuck_ Elias.”

            “Oh,” Jon said limply. “Oh, Martin, I’m—I don’t—” He had no idea what to say. What could he say? “Oh, Martin.” He stepped forward, pulling Martin into his chest, holding him close and hard, as if he could make the bleeding stop if he just held him tight enough. He found himself stroking his hand across the back of Martin’s head. Martin sobbed properly now, pressing his face into Jon’s shoulder, his shoulders shaking. “Shhh,” Jon said, helplessly, not really trying to quiet him so much as make a soothing sort of noise. Then, “Martin,” again. There weren’t any other words inside him.

            Something tickled the back of Jon’s hand, and he looked down to see a large brown spider, pedipalps waving, skittering across it. He cursed, shaking his hand, and then another light touch across his other hand heralded another one. “Martin?” Jon said, softly, trying not to alarm him, and Martin looked up, and Jon took a half-step back in horror. There were three more spiders sitting on the top of Martin’s grubby yellow tunic; there was one perched on his dark hair. Jon blinked, wondering if something had gone wrong with his vision, and then a strange twisting _bright_ feeling hit him, familiar and horrifying, the bitter taste of the drug the large-handed man had force-fed them suddenly rising to his mouth.

            He scrabbled at his ear, trying to find Elias, but Martin had asked him to keep Elias shut off. The spiders were bright colors, all of them, pink and purple and green, and they waved their hands at him and scuttled across Martin, who had staggered back a few paces and sat down at the base of the cliff. The Banded Eye on his chest seemed to rotate and split, until there were eight of them, uneven columns of four and four, and the cracks in the rock behind weren’t cracks at all but eight waving legs.

            The vast high-pitched spider, limned all round by stripes of ochre, lemon and lime, peeled itself out of the rock as Jon watched, iridescent chelicerae drumming, thorny pedipalps stroking across Martin’s head. Martin’s mouth opened, and spiders rushed in, a soft brown-pink tide.

            Beneath Jon’s hands and knees, the sand seemed to ripple and flow, the tide of spiders rushing over his fingers. He wanted to scream, but only scratching came out of his throat. The spiders rustled sardonically, each one a perfect, vibrating pattern in the center of its three-lobed web. Martin didn’t make a sound, barely even moved, as the tide of spiders washed over him. Each one ran into his mouth empty-handed and returned carrying a bright bitter spark that hurt to look at.

            And then, with a strange twanging motion, the landscape seemed to shake itself back to normalcy: the spiders vanished, the colors settled, and the cracks in the rock were cracks again. There was just Martin, slumped against the cliff, his arms curled protectively around his midsection, dark blood drying in trails down his inner thighs.

            Scrambling to his feet, Jon was at his side in half a moment. “Are you all right?” he asked urgently.

            Martin blinked, long and slow, like someone coming out of a trance. “She said—we were under her protection,” he murmured. “She said she was sorry.” His hands were shaking. “Jon—” He reached out, took Jon’s hand and pressed it to his lower stomach. “Jon, can you feel it?”

            A tiny flutter, so faint for a moment Jon thought he’d imagined it; then it came again, harder. He managed to nod. “Yes,” he said, looking up at Martin. “It’s moving.”

            “It’s moving,” Martin agreed, with a hiccupping half-sob. “It’s _alive_.”

            They spent the rest of the day following the cool shadow of the mesa as it traveled in a vast circle. Martin, despite his ordeal, seemed to be feeling much better; Jon was still exhausted with a bone-deep exhaustion that did not seem to improve with rest. He dozed in the shade and woke to find himself shivering as if it were midwinter. Martin moved him into the sun, worriedly, putting a hand on his forehead. “I think you have a fever,” he said. “You look awfully pale, Jon.”

            “I’ll be all right,” Jon told him, but the world shifted uncomfortably if he moved too much. He did not switch Elias on, not sure if Martin was ready to talk to him, not sure what Elias would say about his current condition, and not certain he wanted to know. He should want to know, he knew, but there was a tight knot in his chest, and even his blood seemed to be pumping sluggishly. The fever went down later in the afternoon, and Martin managed to catch them a rabbit, collect a little firewood, and stew it for dinner in water from a little stream three-quarters of the way around their circuit of the mesa. Jon did feel a little better after eating, but the exhaustion continued to dog him, and before the stars had risen, he fell asleep on top of Martin’s chest again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for trans male pregnancy and (temporary) miscarriage, as well as flashbacks to hallucinogenic PoV


	13. Chapter Twelve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Martin and Elias have a much-needed discussion.

            When he woke in the morning, Martin was gone, but he could not have been gone for long, because Jon wasn’t too cold. Elias spoke from beneath his ear; Martin must have switched him on. “He’s waiting for us.”

            “Of course,” Jon said through a throat that shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did. “You two should talk.” He staggered to his feet with a liberal amount of help from the cliff behind.

            Martin was standing at the east edge of the mesa, staring out at the first rays of the rising sun. “Martin,” Jon said quietly, and Martin turned to look at him, the light painting a lighter stripe along his farther cheek and limning his strands of curly dark hair. “I…I brought Elias.”

            Martin gave a short, sharp nod. “Thanks,” he said.

            “If you don’t want to talk to him, I’ll take him away again.”

            Standing quietly, Martin tipped his head to one side with a considering sort of expression. “No,” he said, after a long moment. “No, we should. We should talk. Thanks, Jon.”

            “Of course,” Jon said, and then he reached up to Elias, who had been utterly silent during this entire short conversation. He paused for a moment, fingers hovering over the jewelry, feeling sick and strange at the thought of letting Elias go again, the thought of being quite alone in his neural pathways. And Elias was silent, too. Jon couldn’t tell what he was thinking or even if he _was_.

            With a little shiver, he disconnected the wires, hissing slightly at the twinge of pain that went through the base of his skull and held out the tiny grey triangle to Martin, who took it, letting his fingers linger on Jon’s for a long, long moment, and smiling a little, although sadness lingered at the corners of his eyes. He gave Jon a tiny nod, and Jon suppressed the instinct to reach up to where he knew there wasn’t anything and backed away, to wait.

~

            At first, the connection didn’t feel like anything. There was a little pain just beneath Martin’s ear, but that was all. He stood and tried not to touch it, for fear of jostling it, and watched the sun rise, feeling a bit silly. At some point he became aware of a slight strange fizzing at the base of his brain stem, but he simply watched the hawks taking off, black winged shadows silhouetted against the blue-yellow horizon of the new day.

            The hazy sensation of a hand on his shoulder made him glance to the side, and he found that he could see a blurry image of Elias, wavering like a mirage, but still recognizable, his curly hair falling forward into his eyes, as it always had. He was even wearing that absurd bright garishly-striped cotton suit, and Martin felt tears welling up in his eyes no matter how much he tried to force them away.

            Elias said nothing, merely waited silently, until Martin finally sighed and snapped, “So? Are you going to try to apologize, or are you going to tell me again about how I was just a dalliance?”

            “I feel an apology would seem disingenuous,” Elias said. “Though I was lying about the dalliance. I suppose I could say ‘I never intended to hurt you,’ but I think you would realize immediately the lie inherent in that statement.”

            “You wanted to hurt me so Sasha and I’d leave. I kind of get that, I suppose, although I am utterly furious with you, but—why didn’t you _tell_ me?”

            “Tell you what? That I was an echo of your lover? A _version_ of him? I didn’t even know if he—if I—were dead or alive, Martin.”

            “Like I’d have cared. You know I—”

            “Having multiple lovers is quite different from trying to give twice as much to the same person.” Elias’s gaze flickered to his face and then away again.

            A muscle twitched in Martin’s cheek. “I’m carrying your child,” he said, staring firmly ahead. “Um. Our child. Uh.”

            There was a sudden, chilly, hollow gap of silence. “I—” Elias started, stalled, started again. “I—was not aware that that was a possibility.”

            “Yeah, well. Clearly it was,” Martin mumbled, feeling his shoulders tense up as he pressed a protective hand into his stomach. The baby had been kicking more than ever since the spiders-and-bleeding incident, which was a relief, honestly. Martin himself was also feeling less tired and generally better, but that might just be having had a few good nights’ sleep since the nightmarish struggle at the Center.

            “Hm,” Elias said, his voice quavering very slightly. “Is it—I am still trying to synthesize the information I gained at the Center, but I have the impression that the energy is not…healthy.”

            “It’s fine,” Martin said sharply, then sighed. “I, um. Might’ve possibly somehow gotten Faylik Nashjay to notice me? She—she did something. I thought I’d lost it.” He swallowed, because the spike of pure pain that had gone through him when he looked down at the red trails down his inner thighs was still completely vivid in his memory.

            “Good,” Elias said. “I—assume?”

            “Really?” Martin wheeled on him. “This isn’t exactly all my fault, you know.”

            “Forgive me for not knowing how to respond when the first thing you say to me again is that you’re _pregnant_.”

            “Better than calling you a _dalliance_ —”

            “I did apologize—”

            Martin wanted to hit him, and he also wanted to hug him, and he couldn’t do either. “You fuck,” he said, finally, weary and exhausted. “You found the Center. Why didn’t you come _back_?”

            “Well, there was the small matter of my being dead,” Elias told him wryly. “Minor detail, really.”

            “You weren’t supposed to die,” Martin said, angrily. “You said you’d come back.”

            “I was hardly planning on it, Martin. And I don’t—” he made a noise as if he were breathing through his nose, which was absurdly comforting in its normalcy, even if he couldn’t actually be breathing. “I don’t _know_ what happened. I only have the memories up until the point I reached the library, and from there they diverge.”

            “Well, what do your memories say up till then?” Martin asked.

            “Gertrude and I had ridden out together and spent a few days traveling. Nothing else. Nothing extraordinary.” Elias shot him a wavering, sharp glance. “Do you not think I’ve gone over those memories a hundred times since we found the Center? Since we found…”

            Martin felt his chin quivering. “Yeah, well, I still—I still—” There were tears welling up in his eyes, and he brushed them away. “Did you tell Jon to bed me?” he snarled. “I know what he’s said about how he doesn’t _have_ that kind of desire.”

            “No.” The response was too sharp and too curt.

            “You’re lying,” Martin said, with a weary sigh.

            Elias chuckled at that. “Oh, I _tried_ ,” he said. “But Jon is far too stubborn and ethical. He nearly killed me ripping me out of him without powering the jewelry down, all so he could be certain it was just the two of you that night.” He paused, and something inside Martin seemed to unspool. “Jon is rather the enigma,” Elias continued. “But he, like you, has a—core of steel, I suppose.”

            “I want you both,” Martin said bluntly. “I _still_ —you asshole. I hate that you did this to me, but I still—” he sighed. “If I didn’t want you anymore, Jon’d probably be fine helping me with the child. Even if not, I could raise it myself. So that’s not why. I just love you,” he finished, a little hopelessly.

            “Yes,” Elias agreed. “Martin, I…” he trailed off. “Yes. Well.”

            “It’s okay,” Martin said, with a soft sigh. “I don’t want you to—I don’t even know if you’re the _same_ —I just don’t know whether I should be grieving, I guess? It’s funny.”

            “Don’t,” Elias said sharply, and Martin looked sideways at him in startlement. “Don’t mourn me, Martin. I’m here. I am not—a _ghost_. I am—” he made a heavy, wordless noise. “I will accept your anger,” he said, and the vision of him was growing stronger as Martin watched. “But I will _not_ accept your grief.”

            “I don’t even know if I _know_ you anymore,” Martin snarled, the hurt clouding his voice again. “You—”

            “Hid from you and watched you learn to love Jon and marveled that anything so…intricate as you had ever seen fit to love me? Quite.” Elias spread his hands. “ _We_ are not the same, Martin, you and I, but we never have been. I am not materially altered.”

            “Yeah,” Martin agreed with a sniff. “Okay, sure. You’ve always been an asshole. And now you’re an asshole who’s going to be having a kid in like six months, so I hope you’re up for that.”

            “Ah. Yes. I—” Elias’s face contorted in a way Martin couldn’t read, a peculiar expression as if his emotions were tangling in several different ways at once. “If I had known that you were carrying a child, I would have waited to head for the Center.”

            Martin gave him a bland look. “You absolutely would not have,” he retorted.

            A touch of humor quirked the side of Elias’s mouth. “Would you prefer no comforting lies?” he asked.

            “I—um.” Martin stalled slightly, and he scratched the back of his head. “Well. No. I wouldn’t say that, exactly. But I suppose I wanted to be sure I _did_ still have a handle on you.” He took a deep breath. “Speaking of, I guess, sort of—what’s happening to Jon?”

            “I’m still trying to process all the information,” Elias responded seriously, the smile dropping off his face. “But I—I believe he’s burning.”

            “Burning? I mean—he did, I think, have a fever for a little while—”

            Elias shook his head. “Burning from the inside,” he said softly. “Lit on fire by the energy he absorbed and…unable to expel it?”

            “But…” Martin stalled out. “The spiders,” he said slowly. “They didn’t just help the baby, did they?”

            “You should be burning as well,” Elias replied, voice as dry as the wind. “But you’re not, are you, Martin?”

            Martin’s heart thumped painfully inside his chest. “I’m. I’m a scholar of the Eye,” he said.

            “But the tattoo you bear is not just decoration, either.”

            “…No, I guess not.” Martin shuffled his feet against the dusty ground. “I’ve always kind of hated her?” he said, uncertainly. “I know that people who believe in her—mostly they think she’s hurt or insane or they don’t _care_ —but to me, she always made me think about being rejected. And now, she’s—well. I don’t know how to feel.” He ran two fingers across the back of his neck. “But she saved the child, I can’t hate her anymore. Anyways—what about Jon—what are we going to _do_?”

            “I am going to finish processing,” Elias said, laying each word out as if it were part of a proof. “And once I have filed away all the information from the Center, I may have a better idea of what to do.”

            “And how long will that take?” Martin asked, not quite daring to voice the accompanying question, _And how long does Jon have?_

            “I do not know.” Elias’s voice was clipped. “But I believe it is his best chance.”

            “We should get back to him,” Martin said worriedly. “I want to make sure he’s—as all right as possible, I suppose.”

            “Yes,” Elias agreed. “Martin—I _am_ sorry. For worrying you.”

            Martin barked out something that might have been a laugh, then shrugged. “Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I worry about everything anyway. Come on.” Even though the gesture was superfluous, he found himself beckoning, and the fuzzy Elias-figure in his vision seemed to keep pace with him as he headed back in the direction Jon had left.

~

            Jon was walking in the desert, quite alone. He couldn’t quite seem to remember why. He should go back, something inside him told him. Perhaps it was Elias, but when he reached up to his jaw, he felt only naked flesh. Martin! he realized suddenly. Martin would be able to tell him what was going on. He should go back to Martin. He should go back to the campsite. Yes. That was it. The campsite. Near the stream.

            It was oddly hot. Or—no, not so odd. Desert. Sunlight? He shook his head, putting a hand on his forehead, and pain lanced through it. “Ah!” he hissed, dropping the hand immediately, staring down at it through air that seemed to wriggle and shift. “My hand—”

            “What’s wrong?” Elias’s voice asked, quite far away. Jon scrabbled for him, but still felt nothing.

            “It’s burning,” Jon whispered. His stomach was twisting and turning over. “I—I need—”

            “Jon, can you hear me? Jon!” His head was hurting too, a sudden pounding refrain behind his eyes. It was making it difficult to concentrate.

            “Martin,” he said stupidly. “Where’s Martin?”

            “Try the tent. No, walk forward. You’re not— _Jon_ , what’s wrong?” Who was speaking? It was Elias’s voice, so it had to be Elias, but Elias was not here, was he? Pain in his upper jaw. Jon looked down at his hand, and there was blood on the tips of the fingers.

            “My hand is burning,” Jon said again, through heavy lips, and then there was pain in his knees. He was on the ground, and his stomach was twisting, and there was a sudden sweet taste in his mouth. Then it turned to sour liquid, and he coughed and choked. Everything was so strangely painful and dizzy-dim.

            The ground shook slightly at the tremor of footsteps. “We need to go,” someone who could not be Elias said urgently in Jon’s ear. “Get up, you have to get up.” But it was so hard to hear, and Jon’s hand was _burning_ , and when he looked up into the distorted, plastic face of a Stranger, the only thing he could feel was a sick sense of exhausted failure.


	14. Chapter Thirteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we learn a little about Elias's past.

            The last light of the dying sun was slipping slowly beneath the horizon, and the voices of the community were raised in song. Elias stood beside Gertrude and watched as she carefully raised the flame of her taper to light the candle before her. Elias opened his mouth and sang as well, as Kimah rose bright in the sky, the second candle, moving through its shallow arc. _To Center from Trine_ / _Does Kimah shine,_ Elias thought to himself, even as he sang his way through the evening blessing, automatically running through the translation of the ancient language in his head at the same time, _Blessed are you, Lord, our God, sovereign of the Universe_. Did Kimah really show the way to the Center? When he was old enough, he would ride out there and find out, he promised himself.

            Gertrude, having finished the blessing, took her hands down from over her eyes and reached out to take his hand. The songs of their neighbors, lighting their own candles, finished at different times, as all the little lights winked on in the desert night. As soon as everyone was done, it would be time for what was inarguably the best dinner of the week. Impulsively, Elias turned to Gertrude. “Will you follow Kimah with me, when we’re older?” he asked, and his blood-sister grinned at him.

            “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she told him.

            There was something strange about the singing to the north. Elias frowned, turning, to see what looked like a wave of darkness swallowing the pinpricks of light behind them. Screaming. Darkness and the harmony melting into a discordant cacophony of screams. “Elias, what’s going on?” Gertrude asked, but he couldn’t move a muscle, not even to vibrate his throat. It was like he’d been turned to salt. His body wouldn’t obey the frantic directives of his brain.

            In the yellow light of their candle, beneath the white light of Kimah and the bright moon, the plastic masks of the Strangers gleamed brightly. Elias wanted to run, knew he should run, knew he should at least blow out the damn candle, but that horrible immobility still held him stiff, even as Gertrude grabbed his hand and tried to drag him away. “What are you doing!” she screamed. “Come on! Elias—El—” She was still screaming his name as the Strangers reached them, as the first of the inhuman riders reached down and scooped Elias up in one powerful arm, throwing him back across the saddle of the horse. His voice let go, then, and he screamed, high and thin and terrified, but he was immobilized now by the Stranger’s strong hand and the fear of what would happen if he fell from the galloping horse.

            The night sky shuddered overhead as the horse ran. Elias juddered and bounced around on its back and wondered why they hadn’t just killed him. No one knew anything about the Strangers; no one would even _talk_ about them. Abruptly, hot anger cut through the icy chill of his fear. If they _had_ known, they could have done something. Predicted something. At the very least, he would know whether he was about to die, _how_ he was about to die. It wasn’t fair.

            He lay on the back of the horse, barely able to breathe with the way his ribs were being jarred, and cried, hot, angry tears. After he seemed to run out of energy, even for that, he fell into a sort of half-awake daze. It felt as if everything that made him _him_ was being squeezed out and dissipating in the freezing dry air of the desert night.

            At some point, he was jolted back together, his ribs sore and painful, his throat dry, and his head throbbing. Kimah was gone; the watery light on the horizon was the first streaks of dawn. A huge slick hand fell on Elias’s neck, lifting him up and off the horse, and dropping him to the ground. His legs were numb, and he stumbled and fell onto his knees.

            “Elias!” Gertrude, coughing, was lifting him up. “Listen,” she said quickly and quietly into his ear. “There’s a river nearby, I saw it when we rode past. If we can get there, they won’t be able to catch us.”

            It was difficult for Elias to answer, past the aching pain in his ribs, but he managed to gasp out between shallow, pained breaths, “We’ll drown.”

            “We might not. It’s our only chance. When I tell you, run, okay? Straight towards the rising sun.”

            “I—yeah, all right.”

            Looking around blearily, he saw that he and Gertrude weren’t the only captives. Maybe ten other children had been taken as well, and all of them huddled together in confusion as the Strangers dismounted and began to pass out hard bread to each one of them. One of the Strangers, a huge, hulking man, stepped forward, and Elias watched, still trying desperately to get air into his lungs. The man rolled his head forward, unhooking his mask and stripping it off. The children all let out soft, ragged, frightened noises, but the man behind the mask was nothing inhuman—just a man with a craggy forehead and large, bulbous nose.

            “Gods bless these little ones,” he said in a rumbling, strong voice. “I am Breekon. You will all be given names.” He shut his eyes and began to speak in a strong singsong, repeating over and over a set of fragmented phrases that made no sense to Elias, _very pious acts are not written here, the release of energy is a form of risk, the message is a problem._

            A hand slipped into Elias’s; Gertrude was quietly nudging him back towards the ring of now riderless horses. “Come on,” she murmured, “come on, come on.” Elias had ridden before, but these creatures were twice as large as the wiry donkeys of Lasalama.

            No choice, though. He put his hands on the saddle and heaved, with Gertrude pushing from behind, and then he was up, with a soft desperate yelp of pain as his ribs hit the saddle. He turned, reaching down for Gertrude, and she caught at his hand. “Go!” she shrieked, because Breekon and the other Strangers must have looked up at the noise he’d made.

            Kicking at the horse, Elias hung onto Gertrude’s wrists desperately. She had a foot hooked in one of the stirrups, and the horse was moving now, not fast, but it was moving, starting up an erratic pace that was slowly increasing. The sound of hooves behind them told him that at least one of the Strangers was in hot pursuit. Elias sobbed and grimly tightened his knees around the horse’s belly. The horse was starting to drag to the side.

            “’Lias,” Gertrude said urgently. “Listen. You’re my little brother and I love you, okay? Never forget that.”

            “Gertrude, what—” She swung backwards and let go of his hand. Elias tried to hold on, but the sudden weight was too much; he screamed in pain and dropped her.

            “Go!” Gertrude yelled again, and he heard the slap of her hand on the horse’s flank, and then it was off and truly galloping, with Elias collapsed on top of it, sobbing and quite unable to catch his breath.


	15. Chapter Fourteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a confrontation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is basically the last chapter; the only thing after this is an epilogue and potentially a lot of author's notes.

           It was dark, and Martin’s wrists and eyelids ached. His knees were hurting as well, he discovered after a moment. It was a struggle to open his eyes, and something rigid and hard was pressing against his spine. Someone close by drew in a ragged breath and let it out again in a soft, pained moan, and the chill of recognition was enough to pull Martin’s eyes open, though it didn’t help him much, as there wasn’t much light, and when he tried to turn, he found he could only crane his neck to the side.

            A blurry memory rose up of a Stranger in typical yellow garb behind its flat plastic face shield, of rapid movement, of someone holding up a limp Jon. They’d been found by the Strangers, then, and they were—Martin tested his hands and found that his wrists were aching because of the ropes bound tightly around them. Damn. Not again. Tight enough, too, that he wasn’t convinced even if he did dislocate his thumb again he’d be able to wriggle out. The tips of his fingers were tingling.

            “Shit, fuck, shit,” Martin groaned.

            “Thank the Eye you’re awake,” Elias’s voice said, flat and rapid. “I need you to get me to Jon.”

            Jon. It was Jon’s voice that was moaning in pain, and it hadn’t stopped. He was muttering, too, a rough mess of noises too liquid for speech, too staccato to be empty of all intent. “I—how?” Martin managed. “ _Oof_.” The child had chosen that moment to kick harder than it ever had before.

            “Can you get out of your bindings somehow?”

            “I’m not sure. They’re really tight. Maybe if I work at them?” Wincing, he tried to twist his wrists. It made him hiss in pain, and he wasn’t sure if it was actually causing them to loosen at all. “I don’t think so,” he muttered miserably. “They’re too tight.”

            “Jon is—” Elias brought himself up short, but the fact he had started to speak and stopped himself told Martin how worried he was.

            “I know,” he replied. “I know, I—” So he couldn’t get out of the bonds. He could try to wait until someone entered and perhaps catch them by surprise, but there was every chance they wouldn’t loosen him. Whatever the Strangers had planned for them, it was unlikely to be very good for anyone. And he couldn’t think of anything else to do, so—

            Martin shut his eyes and prayed.

            He could hear his heart beating rapidly in his chest, feel the rush of blood pounding in his ears and pooling sluggishly in the tips of his fingers, and he was sure that it wouldn’t work; how could it? He wasn’t _chosen_ ; he was a sacrifice at best, a piece of rubbish at worst.

            The child kicked, hard, once, twice, pause-beat, three times. Something bright yellow-green began to rotate slowly beneath Martin’s eyelids. _Please_ , he thought. _I know—I know he’s not a sacrifice, or a devotee, or anything like that. But he’s really important to me._ The sweet kaleidoscopic pattern intensified, and Martin could feel its heat flickering like salty breath at the back of his neck, but it blurred and fuzzed and stayed indistinct.

            When she spoke, it wasn’t really speech. It wasn’t exactly images, either, more like a cascade of tangled impressions all falling into Martin’s head at once and then spreading out neatly into their place, unfurling as the web spread itself across his mind. She could not help unless she could not be perceived. The Eye would snap the Web, or burn it by making it into one thing instead of the fuzzy piecemeal double-vision that it was.

            Elias. Martin wrestled with himself for a moment, and then he sighed and murmured, “Can you turn yourself off?”

            “Why?” Elias asked sharply.

            “Trust me?”

            A long, glass-sharp pause. Then, “Fine. If I must.”

            The next moment stretched, taut and sticky, and then the little grey whine of the little grey jewelry flickered off. Something brushed Martin’s mind with a fluffy marmalade flavor that might be approval, and the touch drew his eyes to open, the brightness beyond the lids searing and beyond violet in its intensity.

            Two black motes in the sea of tangy luminescence approached along a queer zigzagging trail, trembling back and forth but always, overall, moving towards him. Between them, something sharp and bitter-biting was caught and moved on invisible strands. As they came closer, he saw the fuzzy halos around their little legs, and the black-on-yellow reflection of the Banded Eye in the slice of reality that was the mirror-bright edge of the knife they held between them.

            He felt their little legs, bone-dry, wind-dry, sand-dry, rustling against his arms, sending shivering pink stripes of sensation crawling up along the fine hairs on the back, and he felt the cold-hot touch of the metal as they sawed at the ropes that bound him, but kaleidoscopes pulsed behind his eyes, and he kept slipping away.

            A moment later, Martin opened his eyes, groaning, and pressed his hands against them before realizing what he had done. He stared down at his swollen wrists, at the ropes that lay parted around them, and then he mouthed a trembling _thank you_ at thin air.

            The next thing he did was reach up and switch Elias back on, feeling the tingling current initiating behind his jaw. The next was to clamber to his feet and stagger around the tent to Jon, who lay on his side with his hands and feet bound, his eyes tight shut. His face was swollen around his eyes, a scattering of purple spots forming across his cheeks and forehead, like coals burning through paper. One of his hands was, if anything, even darker, bloated and swollen and almost black. When Martin reached out in horror to touch it, he found that it was burning hot. Martin could barely get himself to saw through the ropes binding Jon’s arms and legs.

            Trembling, he pressed Jon’s hand to his lips. Jon was deathly silent, his firmly closed eyes moving rapidly beneath the lids. Martin had never seen anything like this before, this—fire inside his friend, burning him from the inside out, as if he’d somehow swallowed a star. Tears overflowed Martin’s cheeks as he gazed down at Jon, pressing the burning hand against his cheek, kissing Jon’s unresponsive palm.

            “Martin,” Elias’s voice said urgently from beneath Martin’s ear. “I am going to try something. If it doesn’t work, I expect I will probably be permanently incapacitated, although there may be some possibility of repairing my circuits. But I believe I know what’s wrong with Jon, and I think that if I try, I can…well, never mind. There’s very little time for technicalities. The point is if this works, I think I can save him. If you would be so kind as to move me?”

            “I—” He wanted to object. He wanted to tell Elias _no_ , that he wouldn’t risk him again, but—Jon. And Elias caring _that much_ : that, too. “All right.” He remembered just in time to switch him off before peeling him off and slipping him onto Jon’s skull, flicking him back on.

            Almost before Martin’s fingers had released it, the little grey triangle gave a humming whine, and swirling black lines slowly blossomed outward from the delicate hollow of Jon’s throat. They twisted downwards like ink spilling across a page, and it was only then that Martin realized that somehow, impossibly, those strange black strokes formed _letters_ , raised beneath Jon’s skin.

            _There will come soft rains_ , wound down across Jon’s miserably skinny chest, and _It was evening when we came to the river_ _._ _The sea will bear sea wrought_ along his collarbone. _The center cannot hold. The center of danger is here. The center of danger is here. The site must be marked. The site must be marked in such a way that its purpose cannot be mistaken_. And on and on, the words coiling down Jon’s flesh, along his muscles and stomach. _Des mains tristes, des mains sages._ _There are no words written on the black rocks._ His breathing hiccupped and gasped, and he jerked as the dark lines continued their journey across his flesh, finally winding their way back up and across his face, the text turning from something like sprawling handwriting to tiny sharp pricks of letters, _Sandia National Laboratories charged a panel of outside experts with the task to design a 10,000-year marking system for the_ _WIPP_ _(Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) site, and estimate the efficacy of the system against various types of intrusion. The goal of the marking system is to deter inadvertent human interference with the site._

As the letters reached Jon’s eyes, they sprang open, and they were black from lid to lid.

            “Jon?” Martin asked.

            “No,” Jon’s lips answered. “Jon is not—conscious. He’s probably better off that way for the time being.”

            “ _Elias_?”

            “I am afraid we don’t have much time.” Those black eyes turned towards Martin, and Jon put his head on one side, in a way that was so familiar Martin actually sobbed. “We need to get out of here.”

            He held out a hand, and Martin stared for a moment and then, trembling, took it. “Right,” he said. “Right.”

            “I know you were only partially conscious when the Strangers took us, but I believe Sasha and Tim and the Huntresses are here as well,” Elias told him as they took two steps towards the tent entrance, hand in hand. “These Strangers—it’s the same group that has been following us now for some time. They—”

            The tent flap opened before they could reach it, and a woman stepped inside, straight-backed and tall, taller than Elias’s old body and nearly as tall as Martin. Her white hair was tied back in a tight braid. “Well,” she said. “This is a surprise.”

            “Gertrude?” Martin had recognized her, but Elias spoke first. “Thank the Eye. We need help. I’m sure this seems rather odd, but I’m Elias—”

            “Really,” Gertrude said in a strangely flat voice. And then she raised her bow and drew it taut. “How _did_ you manage that?”

            Martin automatically stepped in front of Elias, even as he heard the sudden, shocked hiss of breath his lover gave through Jon’s lungs. And to draw such a reaction from Elias—Martin hadn’t known Gertrude very well, and most of his response was just, _of course it couldn’t be that easy_ , but Elias was not exactly demonstrative of his feelings at the best of times.                        “ _Gertrude_ ,” Elias said, and Jon’s voice was actually trembling. “Gertrude, what are you—”           

            “I am not Gertrude. I peeled off that old skin a long, long time ago. I am a Stranger, and I am pledged to see the sacred spaces of our gods remain intact. I killed you once, Elias, and I’ll do it again.”

            Elias flinched minutely. “You—” His eyes flickered to her hands, then back to her face.

            “Oh, you don’t remember?” She grinned, her smile widening, took the arrow from the bow and turned, leaning it against the entrance. “You were kneeling down, turned away from me, and I took up a rock—” Leaning to the side, she demonstrated, picking up a great grey stone. “And you turned and asked what I was doing, because you still trusted her, the woman you thought was your sister. When I struck you—”

            “I imagine I died,” Elias replied, in Jon’s driest voice.

            “Not right away,” the Stranger smiled, spreading her hands gently, hefting the rock. “You were flat on your back, bleeding from a cracked skull, and you said to me, ‘Where is Kimah?’ I didn’t tell you.”

            Martin wanted to scream at her to shut up, because the tightening in the corners of Jon’s lips spoke volumes. But she was so focused on Elias and Jon that she wasn’t paying much attention to him. Jon’s eyes flicked quickly to the side and back, and Martin followed the subtle directive to find that the Stranger had left her thick longbow leaning up against the entrance. Stupid, but maybe she was the kind of person who only thought of the arrows as the danger. What could you possibly do with nothing but a bow, after all? It was just a length of wood. A heavy, thick length of wood.

            “Kneel down, Elias,” the Stranger said, as Martin sidled around her.

            “I don’t think so,” Elias told her.

            “You don’t have much choice,” she replied, sounding amused. “You can’t hurt me. You couldn’t possibly touch someone with your sister’s face, could you?”

            The wood was heavy and solid as his questing hands tightened on it, and he lifted it. The smile on Jon’s face became eerily wide, although a faint hint of wistfulness hovered around his eyes. He leaned forward. “The trick is _I don’t have to_ ,” he said, clearly.

            “What do you—”

            Martin swung the bow like a club as hard as he could, and it collided with her skull with an audible crunch. She collapsed immediately, but Martin hit her a few more times just to be sure she was down, then another time for the flicker of pain she’d put on Jon’s—Elias’s face.

            Elias himself took a long, shuddering breath and rubbed a hand across his face. It came away smeared black with ink, and he stared at it blankly. “Odd,” he said, after a moment. “Well.” His gaze rested for a long moment on Gertrude’s shattered body, and then he looked back at Martin. “Thank you,” he said. “I suppose we had better go find the others, hadn’t we?”

            “Are you all right?” Martin asked, shifting his hold on the bow. He bent down and retrieved the quiver of arrows from over Gertrude’s shoulder.

            “Of course,” Elias answered, still sounding a little distant. “I feel—foolish. That’s all.”

            Martin didn’t buy that for a minute, but there really wasn’t much time to mourn. Not if they wanted to actually get away. How long had the Strangers been following them? How long had these same Strangers—

            “Gertrude must have been quite perturbed when Jon appeared,” Elias said in a low voice, as the two of them ducked out of the tent. “She must have thought she’d kept the Center well away from the prying Eye.” He sounded bitter and raw, hollowed out. It would be better, Martin thought, to be silent, but he didn’t say anything. Elias needed this. “So this is why Strangers have dogged us the entire journey.” He paused. “I—wonder. I wonder if she was responsible for our encounter with the Spider in Maysklaro.”

            They slipped quickly from tent to tent, barely opening each flap—just enough to see who or what was inside each one. Here and there they had to step carefully to avoid the notice of a Stranger, but fortunately none of them seemed to be on particularly high alert.

            In the third tent, they found Sasha and Tim, tied up and flung down haphazardly beside a very encouraging-looking pile of weapons. “Oh, thank the Eye,” Martin breathed, flinging himself down onto his knees in front of Sasha. “Are you all right?” he asked, already sawing through her bonds, and she launched herself at him, flinging her arms around his neck.

            “Oh, _Martin_. I thought—I thought for sure—I saw the plumes of smoke from the Center, and I thought—” And then she was kissing him, her lips fluttering across his whole face. She felt so _right_ in his arms, Martin thought; it had definitely been too long since they’d really touched each other. A noise jerked its way out of his throat, not quite a sob, and he rubbed his hands up and down her back.

            “Sasha—” Tim said, standing up and rubbing his wrists. Despite the fact that Elias had freed him, he ignored him entirely. “Martin. Are you all right?”

            Martin nodded jerkily. “The others?” he asked.

            “I haven’t seen much of them, but I think they’re all right as well,” Tim replied. “Now, look, why don’t you stay here, while I—”

            “ _Really_?” Martin cut in, incredulous. “You…you really think I can’t handle—after _everything we’ve been through_ , you’re still trying to, what, _protect_ me?”

            “Martin,” Tim said. “If you’d just _listened_ to me, this wouldn’t have—”

            “No, no, shut _up_ , okay?” It was just one more thing; he shouldn’t be paying so much attention to the sudden, pinched pain just beneath his heart, this particular one, this one that had been there since he was sixteen and had left the Huntresses and cut off all his hair and Tim had looked at him and said, “But your beautiful hair, why would you—” and Martin had just gone quiet, because that was what he _did_ , and he needed Tim, and he—“Shut up,” Martin said again, in defense of his sixteen-year-old self. “I’m a grown man, okay? I can take care of myself. I can take care of more than just myself. When I needed help, you—you helped, yeah, you did, and I’m grateful, I’ve _been_ grateful, but that’s not _me_ anymore? I don’t—I don’t need your protection; I need faith in me, that I can actually _do_ things? And I think I’ve proven that over and over again, and frankly if you can’t understand that you can just fuck right _off_.”

            Sasha was nodding against his neck. “I thought you’d—we _talked_ about this,” she said, her voice laden with hurt. “And I suppose we don’t really have time to have this all out now, but—I’m sorry, Tim. It’s over.”

            Tim stared at her incredulously. “What, because I wanted to _protect_ —”

            “Because you categorically refuse to view either of us as adults, Tim.”

            “I—”

            “All right, this is all very empowering, but we do not have time for this conversation to continue any longer,” Elias cut in.

            “Right, yeah.” Martin got to his feet and held out a hand to Sasha, which she took, and he helped her to her feet as well. Tim’s mouth snapped shut, though he looked frankly murderous.

            They found Daisy, Basira, and Melanie in the next tent, also bound hand and foot, and looking extremely angry about it. Martin gave a brief sigh of relief to see they were still alive, though he should already have expected it, given Tim’s existence. Quickly, he and the others sawed through the ropes binding the Huntresses and handed them the bows and daggers they had picked up in the last tent.

            Armed and ready, they were just about to sneak out, and Martin was just starting to feel that everything had gone quite well and they might actually be able to escape, when a wailing cry went up, setting the back of his neck prickling. “They’ve found Gertrude,” Elias said tersely, and his hand sought Martin’s, warm and slick with fluid that did not feel like sweat or blood.

            “If we have to fight, we’re ready,” Daisy said grimly.

            There was nothing else for it. Martin squeezed Elias’s hand tightly and tried not to wonder, again, if this was _really_ the time they weren’t going to make it back alive. At least he’d—and then Jon’s hand was on the side of his cheek as Elias drew him down for a rapid kiss. “You’re mine, Martin,” he said, thick and dark, and Martin tasted something astringent yet vaguely floral on his lips.

            “Always,” Martin gasped. “Better than you at remembering it,” he added almost _sotto voce_ ; Elias chuckled. On Martin’s other side, Sasha leaned quickly against him and then released him. The three of them, the three Huntresses, and Tim stepped out of the tent into the harsh white light of day, where the Strangers were already gathering.

            Martin calculated the odds, quickly. Six of them—seven, if Elias and Jon were well enough to fight—against the remaining fifteen or so Strangers. Not good. Not, strictly speaking, impossible to survive, but really not good. Still, what other choice did they have? He raised his bow, bending it back and making ready.

            And then Jon stepped in front of them. Martin didn’t know how he knew it wasn’t Elias anymore—something different in the set of his shoulders or the stoop of his head, perhaps? But there was a visible difference, even if Martin couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

            Jon’s long hair was fluttering in the wind, and the raised black words on his skin were still clearly visible, but his eyes were clear, the tracks of dark liquid tracing tracks like teartracks down them dried. “I am the Wizard of Open Doors,” he said, his voice barely raised, and the cadence a little off from Jon’s normal, more deliberate, more stentorian, and yet strangely flat. “Put down your weapons.”

            “What are you doing?” Martin hissed, but Jon didn’t seem to hear him.

            “You’re afraid,” he said, still in that same, slow, steady voice. “Kill us, you think, and the knowledge dies, and the land is safe. You’re wrong. These—” he gestured at the other six. “They found the Center and its secrets. The wax folk followed them and tried to burn it, and if it had burned, you are right, it would have killed many, many people.”

            One of the Strangers released an arrow, and before any of them could react, it thudded into Jon’s shoulder. He gasped very quietly, but did not move, even as red blood started to bloom through his ripped tunic. “And you think that will never happen again? The only way to avoid an error is to detect it. Secrecy will not save you. It will only make the inevitable doom so much worse.” He paused, and shivered, and spoke again, voice even flatter and less like Jon’s. “If you can hear your voice freely, you can think freely. Freedom is never lost, and knowledge never retreats. You are fighting a losing battle and always will be. And one day, if you do not join us, if you do not let people have the knowledge of how to protect the Center, the wax folk will set the sky ablaze. I have seen it happen.”

            Another bow was raised, but another one of the Strangers raised their hand to hold it down. “Wait,” they said. “If he is really the Wizard of Open Doors…”

            “I am the one whom you call that, resurrected in blood and ink, reconstructed from the same knowledge you would keep hidden.”

            “How can we believe you?” asked the Stranger who had held up a hand. “Gertrude was _ours_ , and you’ve killed her.”

            “She was mine first.” And that wasn’t Jon or the Wizard; it was pure Elias. “What Martin killed was nothing but an empty shell.”

            A faint little buzzing murmur swept through the remaining Strangers. “Prove you’re the Wizard,” said the Stranger who had spoken first.

            “How can I prove that?” He sounded amused and wistful at the same time. “Everything you know about me has been twisted by millennia after millennia. All I can tell you is that I oversaw the Devil’s Heart, that I became Death, that I was once—” he bit off the words, and Martin heard Elias speak, very softly, “Most of them were children when they were taken, I should think. But they’re all of them of the same blood as the two of us.”

            Jon—or the Wizard—laughed, gently, a little questioningly. “Ah—oh—I see. We were never very—well. I suppose we have the knowledge, still.” He began to hum, a soft, mournful, wailing tune that reminded Martin a little of the wind, and it took him a moment to recognize that it was the tune of the prayer that Elias used to sing to the rising stars.

            A strange silence spread across the encampment. There was only Jon’s voice, reedy and cracked, growing slowly louder and steadier. After a moment, Elias’s joined him, rising and falling in a way Martin could not quite predict. And then, one of the Strangers stepped forward, swept their helmet off their head, and began to sing as well. “What are you _doing_?” hissed another, but a second and then a third joined in, clumsily taking off their helmets to reveal their faces as well. All three of them had the same loose curls as Elias.

            “Stop!” one of the central Strangers snarled. “Is this what Breekon taught you?” They drew out their dagger and made as if to strike at one of the singers, but two more of the Strangers grabbed them and held them back.

            “He’s the _wizard_ , and he’s one of us!”

            “It’s a trick, you idiots!”

            In another moment, what had been an orderly group of intimidating Strangers had devolved into a swirling knot of vicious, desperate human beings fighting amongst themselves. Blood sprayed across the sand; Jon winced but did not stop singing. It was over as quickly as it had started, with four of the Strangers down and the rest standing dazedly and looking at the unhelmeted trio. Silence fell again, broken only by the unending melodic wail. Jon was pale, his hand pressed against his shoulder, dark fluid leaking from beneath his fingers.

            One of the Strangers stepped forward, their naked face fish-belly white underneath the harsh light of the sun. “We want to see the stars again,” they said softly. “Please?”

~

            The sun was setting, painting pink and orange streaks across the horizon, falling into a boiling cauldron of gold at the edge of the world. Martin kicked his feet against the solid stone of the mesa beneath him, staring out across the valley below. It was odd to find yourself working with a group of people who’d spent years trying to kill you. The Strangers didn’t really seem to know how to behave about it either, although Elias had managed to corral them all together to perform some kind of burial and mourning ritual for Gertrude and the others who’d died.

            Sasha, being Sasha, was tentatively making friends; Tim was sulking. One of the youngest Strangers had taken over looking at people’s injuries, with advice from Elias, who had what appeared to be an effectively limitless amount of knowledge stored in his head, although his ability to access it was still somewhat sporadic. Jon’s shoulder injury turned out not to be terribly severe, although he had been dazed and sleeping on and off since the confrontation. The burned places on his face and hands had been replaced by black ink that had faded even before the end of the day. Elias said he would be fine. Martin was trying to believe him.

            There was a tiny brown spider making its way across the pale stone. Martin watched it, skittering in a not-very-direct line towards him, pausing, waving its little pedipalps in the air, the golden light of the dying sun reflected in its eight large eyes. He put a considering finger down near it, and the spider approached slowly. It brushed against his finger so lightly he felt nothing and then crawled up onto it and sat there, settling down as if it were quite happy to remain, at least for a little while.

            They sat together in a strangely companionable sort of way, for some time, as the light of the sun slowly faded and the shadows lengthened, tenebrous fingers creeping towards the base of the cliff.

            “What kind of world will this child be born into?” Martin asked the little spider, watching the stars rising above the horizon, and pressing his free hand to the almost imperceptible swell of his stomach.

            “A clearer one, I should think.” Martin startled, looking up, to see Jon standing behind him. “It’s me,” Jon said. “Erm, I think, anyway.” His soft dark hair was loose and falling about his shoulders.

            “Well, it isn’t me,” Elias said from beneath his chin. “So that leaves—”

            With a shaky sigh, Jon sat down beside Martin, his legs dangling carelessly off the side of the mesa. “I think the wizard might still be in my head, somewhere,” he said, with a frown. “I still don’t know if it really was him, or if it was just me—all of it’s quite fuzzy, and so are the memories I think Elias left that were…his? Maybe? Fragments of a very different world, and the sky burning, and…” he drew his knees into his chest. “Well. A very different world.”

            Gently, Martin let the little spider down and watched it pause, wave its pedipalps one more time, almost like a greeting, and then scurry off into the darkness. Then he reached sideways and drew Jon closer, laying his head against Jon’s shoulder and sliding one hand up to tangle it in Jon’s silky hair. Jon made a low, pleased kind of noise and turned his face to press it into the palm of Martin’s hand.

            “If you would like,” Elias said slowly, his voice amused but low and a little husky, “I can show Jon what desire feels like.”

            “Yes, please,” Martin exclaimed. “If Jon—”

            “Gods, yes.”

            “Well, then.”

            There was a brief pause, and then Jon took in a soft, long breath, and tipped Martin’s chin up. “That is…a _lot_ ,” he said, and then he kissed Martin, hard and hot and desperate. Martin moaned into his mouth and reached for his shoulders, and Jon’s long hair fell about both of them, a shimmering curtain dividing them from the rest of the world, just for a little while.

 


	16. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the story ends.

            “You were born about six months later,” Da concluded. He’d taken over the story in the middle when Dad said, “I really don’t remember much about the part when I was dying of radiant energy.”

            Da ruffled Gertrude’s hair. “We set up a school at the Center first,” he explained. “And we spent a lot of time getting ridding of wax folks’ bodies and using the Strangers’ gear to keep us safe while we contained the energy.”

            “Using the sniffers to find it?” Gertrude asked, eagerly. She loved the clicking noises sniffers made when they found dangerous energy.

            “Mostly we used the cats, actually, at that point,” Dad told her, ducking back in. “Elias hadn’t quite figured out how to build the sniffers.”

            “Excuse you,” Papa cut in almost before Dad had finished his sentence. “I knew how to build them, I simply didn’t have the materials to—”

            Dad put a hand over his own mouth. Ma and Da both laughed. Dad’s eyes flickered between black and brown, and then Papa said, rather sulkily, from the jewelry beneath Dad’s ear, “Jon. _Really_.”

            “You know we know you’re basically omniscient. You don’t have to use _every_ chance to remind us.” But Dad was smiling.

            “And when I’m old enough, I’ll go to the school, too?” Gertrude put in eagerly.

            “Of course you will,” Da told her. “The one at the Center or the one at Lasalama, if you like.”

            “I’m going to be a scholar and Fay will come with me and she can be a scholar too!” Fay ran up Gertrude’s arm as if she understood, and Gertrude felt her little legs scratching against her hair.

            “You will be a wonderful scholar,” Ma told her. “You should put Fay back now, though; it’s almost time for the ritual, and she won’t like the cold.”

            “All right,” Gertrude said, with a small sigh, knowing better than to bother saying _she_ wouldn’t like the cold either. She got up, a little stiff from sitting beside the fire for so long, and went over to the terrarium to let Fay down. When she turned back, Da was holding out her puffy white feather-down coat. She took it and pulled it on. The one nice thing about winter was that wearing her coat was like wearing a quilt. The cold still got in and stung her face fiercely, though.

            But maybe it was worth it, all the same, she thought, as she followed Dad outside. Da and Ma came after her, Ma carefully closing the door behind them and Da putting a soft hand on her shoulder. The stars were climbing slowly into the sky above them, piercing and bright, like little eyes scattered across the firmament. When Gertrude got a little older, she was going to have a tattoo of the Banded Eye on her left wrist, and a tattoo of Grandmother Nashjay on her right. Her parents had promised.

            Ma stood on her left, Da on her right, their arms across her shoulders. Dad was in front of them; well, probably Papa was doing most of this right now. Either way, it was Dad’s hand lighting the two candles, though it was Papa’s voice that started the song, with everyone else joining in a moment or two after, in a scattered, sweet chorus. The candles twinkled brightly, mimicking the stars beyond. For a long moment, Gertrude stared out at the arc of the sky and felt like she was falling, like there was no down or up but only the spiraling cosmos all around, waiting to envelop her.

            And then Papa’s voice rose stronger and louder, and Dad half-turned to look at her, smiling in the candlelight, and she was rooted again on earth with all four of her parents at her side. Someday, maybe, she thought, she could travel to the sky and find out the secrets of all those little eyes. She could speak to Kimah herself. Someday.

            “Come on, let’s get back inside, Gertrude’s shivering,” Da said solicitously, and she leaned against his solid warmth, feeling safe. Maybe she’d get a tattoo of Kimah, too, just above her belly button, she thought sleepily. She’d be an explorer one day, just like her ma and all her das.

            But for now…maybe for now it was time to go back in and go to sleep. She paused at the doorway and looked back at Dad, who was still waiting, hovering near the candles. Funny, the way the shadows fell about him made him look for a moment as if he had a pair of great dark wings and a silly wide-brimmed hat.

            He winked at her, turned, and blew out the candles, and as he followed her back into the warmth of their little house, he was just Dad-and-Papa again. But it had been rather a strange night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Throwing some of my worldbuilding notes in here for anything that might not have been clear:
> 
> \- Santio: San Antonio  
> \- "windmill chase" = "wild goose chase", from Don Quixote  
> \- Nabiaha: the US Southwest, from a corruption of the Navajo word for world or country  
> \- Grifwigo, from "gran fuego", Spanish for "big fire"  
> \- Maysklaro: Mesaclero, NM  
> \- the Trine: Trinity Site, NM  
> \- "whirligig" = a fan  
> \- the secondary fandom for this fic is glowing cats is "Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant", , excerpts from which may be found here: https://urbigenous.net/library/WIPP/ . It is a set of protocols commissioned by Sandia National Laboratories as a way to keep nuclear waste safe for generations. More reading on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant may be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
> 
> Glowing cats are a reference to the "radiation cats" or "rad cats", the idea of genetically engineered cats that glow in response to high levels of nuclear radiation, as a way to warn people that doesn't rely on language. 
> 
> Update (thanks to Slant!): Ray cats are from Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri''s response to the Human Interference Taskforce, documentary called The Ray Cat Solution here:  
> https://vimeo.com/138843064  
> \- the Wax Folk who worship the "Wide Father", sacrifice little boys to him, and talk about "fiery ghosts" and "walking beyond death" is a lump of references to Fat Man and Little Boy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy) and "radiation ghosts" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signs_and_symptoms_of_radiation_poisoning#%22Walking_Ghost_phase%22)  
> \- the Great Spider, Faylik Nashjay, in addition to being a Mr. Spider reference, is the Catholic saint of spiders (Felix) mixed with the legend of Grandmother Spider
> 
> \- the "wizard of open doors" is J.R. Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, NM (Lasalama), who came from a nonpracticing New York Jewish family; the section on the wizard of open doors and the "devil's heart" is a reference to the very real and quite horrifying saga of the "demon core" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core), Flower is Harry Daghlian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Daghlian) and Lo is Louis Slotin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin) although I promise there is no suggestion of any of them ever having been lovers. The story is intended to be quite a bit diverged from the original history and I took a lot of artistic liberties. (warning: a lot of the links in here are QUITE gruesome)
> 
> \- "caminayora" is a mash of La Llorona and another reference to the "walking ghost phase"
> 
> \- the book glowing under the glass occurs because of Cherenkov radiation from a highly radioactive source (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation) and Jon tasting metal in his mouth is an attested symptom of radiation exposure, thought to be caused by nerve damage (http://optimalprediction.com/radiation-and-the-metallic-taste-phantom/)
> 
> \- after being caught in a fire at the Center, Jon and Martin evince very classic symptoms of acute radiation syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_radiation_syndrome) (warning: this one's also pretty gruesome reading)
> 
> \- the section where Elias heals Jon contains quotes from a number of sources, including "There will come soft rains" by Sara Teasdale, several unpublished poems by J.R. Oppenheimer, "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats, and once again "Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant"
> 
> \- when Jon channels the wizard of open doors he references a few more Oppenheimer quotes: "We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to enquire”, “And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.” and "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" (originally from his translation of the Bhagavad-Gita) and when he starts humming, he's humming the Shema (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shema_Yisrael), because most of the audience is from the group of kidnapped Jewish children that also included Gertrude and Elias
> 
> \- I liberally applied the use of Google Translate and https://www.translationparty.com/ to make things sound appropriately like they'd been translated and retranslated for 7000 years or so
> 
> Many thanks to everyone for reading and I hope you enjoyed!


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